Won't work.
Consider a typical server. It runs news/mail/http or so. It's configured to
cope with a maximal mail load, OR a maximal http load, OR a bunch of
news-to-be-debatched. It'd be rather expensive to make that box run well
with AND instead of OR here.
IMHO, the only workable way to do this is to introduce a couple of load
thresholds, like "IF the load of FOO goes above BAR, stop the process which
contributes most to that load (assuming there's more than one) until the
FOO load goes below BAZ". Make BAR and BAZ configurable for a bunch of
different FOOs, and (via ulimit or similar) for a bunch of different
processes (wouldn't want our X server or xterm to get stopped, no matter
how high the load is). Try a couple of different settings and see what you
can do.
The current way of doing things is admittedly very suboptimal. I mean, two
processes should finish in roughly twice the time one process needs, right?
Well, if one of these eats and uses 60% of available physical memory, two
of those could finish in ten times that time. That's a bug, IMHO. A
difficult-to-fix bug, do be sure, but that doesn't mean the attempt
shouldn't be made.
Is there a description of the way BSD handles this problem, if any,
available electronically anywhere?
--
Matthias Urlichs \ noris network GmbH / Xlink-POP Nürnberg
Schleiermacherstraße 12 \ Linux+Internet / EMail: urlichs@noris.de
90491 Nürnberg (Germany) \ Consulting+Programming+Networking+etc'ing
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