[ale] BogoMips uselsess?

[Michael Hirsch]

UnderGrid Founder writes:
> Chris Ricker decided to waste my bandwidth saying:
> > 
> > make -j # bzImage
> > 
> 	Better yet... if you got the RAM to spare just run it with the command
> 'make -j bzImage' and let it run as many processes and use as much RAM as it
> needs

ACK!  Not a good idea unless you really know what you are doing.

> ... on a nice dual PII-400 with plenty of RAM (512MB) I've seen it run
> up to 513 process and the load to 88 and still have over 100MB of the RAM
> left untouched and never touch swap space... 

Yes, you prefaced it with "if you've got lots of RAM", but that is a
weak warning.  If you don't have the RAM this will slow your machine
to a crawl.  For instance, if you have 96 Meg of RAM you might think
you have "lots", but in the example provided you would have become I/O
bound.  

I speak from experience.  I tried to compile something (the GIMP?)
with -j and only 32 Meg of RAM but I have just added a whole bunch of
swap so I had something like 160 MB of Swap.  When the number of
processes hit 65 I finally maned to move the mouse into a another
window and kill the parent process.

--Michael