• 263 Posts
  • 6.37K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle












  • Not trying to shit on your idea here, but this is actually going to make your systems much less performant in a number of ways. Let me explain why.

    The Linux kernel memory scheduler is extremely good at what it does. It’s probably the reason why Linux crushed adoption into the server market so rapidly 20+ years ago. Not only is it fast, it’s super smart.

    The process scheduler is also top-tier, with BSD only sliiightly maybe winning out in some edge cases because it takes more resources into consideration when planning executions. This is why BSD wins out in the network performance category so often (until very recently).

    All of that to say, if you have enough memory to hold whatever you need to run in memory, everything runs great. Cut to you not having memory, and needing to swap.

    Once swap enters into the fray, the performance of both memory and process scheduling drops exponentially depending on the number of running processes. For each extra process needing more memory, the rest of the system takes a hit from the interrupt needed to find and clear cached pages, or allocate swap. This is called Memory Contention.

    Memory Contention engages a whole host of different levera in various parts of the kernel. The more you have, the more CPU cycles you use to solve for it, and you also increase wait time for everything in the system from I/O interrupt at the process scheduler.

    What you’re doing by enabling BOTH swap and zram in the way you are increasing the workload of the kernel by a factor of two, so twice the amount of effort at the CPU, and twice the amount of I/O wait when contention comes into play. It’s just not performant, and it’s wasting energy.

    They both deal with swap, just either at the disk or available allocated RAM space, and you’re just making your machine do extra work to figure out where it should be swapping to.


  • Well, you’re either unaware of, or just ignoring a lot of things that do not fit into your tidy explanation.

    Every been the Bay Area in the US? You know what it takes to ride a bike from one side of SF to the other and any direction? What about crossing a bridge to Oakland? What about crossing the GGB to get to literally any other city on the other side?

    Also,.most major US cities were not built for walking, only East Coast earlier cities. Let me ramble off a bunch that discount your point: Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Denver, Philadelphia, and even Washington DC.

    Your immediate response is going to be something like “Well they WERE originally…”, but that doesn’t matter. Maybe 100+ years ago, but that’s not where we live. We live in the reality of now, and that reality is that none of the cities are AS accessible by walking or bike as they are with cars. If not Topography, then the general logistics of where jobs vs living spaces are located.

    People don’t have the luxury of choosing where they get to live in the US anymore in proximity and convenience of their commute to work. Just not the reality of things. No argument you might have will beat the consumer logic of finding the most ideal place to live first, and worrying about the commute second. Likely to be by car.



  • Yes it has been solved in other countries…with 1/5 the land mass of the US. That’s the problem as I mentioned.

    Every major US city aside from LA has both local and long distance train networks, and they are heavily utilized. These cities were not planned around walking or rail though. Most US cities didn’t even hit what constitutes as “Urban” density until after the advent of the car,.so everything is built around cars. Reclaiming land to focus on ped or rail after the fact is in quite difficult.

    Case in point, the California high speed rail project which has blown Billions of dollars over more than a decade and has yet to manifest anything usable. That’s just one state, and only serving a handful of cities. Doing this in a national scale as Japan has done is just not going to happen when Air Travel is faster.




  • I’m just speaking from the economics of your points here, but people DO NOT put their money in crypto because they think it’s safe. It’s simply not true by and large.

    They certainly put it in precious metals and commodities that are not tied to any specific market or nation. That’s why Gold and Silver just had historic market performance, but there are no large market shifts towards crypto or speculative financial assets for anything other than a bet.

    Before you start in with the “crypto isn’t speculation” stuff…it is. It has no inherent value, is not tied to real world goods or services, and has no political benefit. This is why institutions, including nation-states start wars over commodities, not crypto. If markets crash, a government can use its gold reserves to pay for things. If interest rates rise, they can use commodities as leverage to counteract negative impacts.

    Crypto has absolutely no use except for people who want to collect crypto. If a World War breaks out, crypto will be useless. You can’t pay for grain to feed your people your Pokemon cards, and you can’t buy raw goods for your production sectors with crypto. It’s just not a thing.