Good BSD/Linux Article (somewhat off-topic)

[Colin Percival]

At 00:45 18/01/2004, Jeremy Faulkner wrote:
>Colin Percival wrote:
> > Actually, this raises an interesting point -- if
>>1. There is a significant amount of network traffic,
>>2. There is memory pressure, and
>>3. There are several runnable processes,
>>it might be a good idea to give scheduling priority to the oldest
>>process, in the hope that it will complete and free its memory.
>>Colin Percival
>
>dnetc and seti would be the oldest process on some machines. So making 
>this a mandatory setting would be counter productive.

   You're absolutely right -- s/oldest process/oldest process which
started within the past 5 seconds/ would probably be more appropriate.
(And, for bonus points, we could make this behaviour depend upon a
global variable which would be set by network drivers if they detected
the string "slashdot" within any incoming packets...)

Colin Percival