What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 1990

killall -KILL firefox

Seriously; the degradation happens pretty gracefully as it swaps more and more. Then, if you don't address the issue it will go into "swapping bouts" once every 15 minutes or so.

Nothing new. Such swapping bouts (really, a total realignment of working sets) are known from all timesharing systems that are run severely memory-constrained.

here you lost me.

I just googled, had the writeup within 15 seconds.

The thingy the cd drive is mounted into that makes it removable from the laptop. It is just a hardware wrapper around a ATA drive, and can fit the slimmer 2.5" ATA drives.

snip the use of blinkelights

Sometimes I wonder a bit. You were right at the center of DEC high-end development; yet saw no heavy database use. These have been the bread and butter of storage design at least since the early seventies.

They were sort of integrated into VMS too. That was what RMS was all about. (although I would like to know what the RMS designers were smoking at the time).

Databases live their own life. They also need to be internally defragmented, just like file systems.

The access patterns on fragmented ISAM-VSAM files is pretty easy to see, or even feel, when you see a disk file. There are urban legends about severan database gurus, but I think the original was James Martin that went over to the machine in question, placed a hand on the disk drive; and told them what was wrong with performance. ("reorganize your ISAM files").

I beg to differ. Even here, the world has moved on. Or, I buy the idea of keeping significantly different data in different file systems.

The big thing about logical volume management is that you make a solid foundation with a raid, or a raid of raids to provide storage; and then you build logical disk packs withing that.

Then you have logical file system sepraration, and you can have a separate system enforce it.

The advantage about having logical volume management is that the individual bad disks can be replaced and data reconstructed can be done without affecting system use other than constraining available IO capacity.

All of this is now included in Linux,and in full deployment in the BSDs.

-- mrr