[mondoshawan]

This article is a bit strange and conflates disk storage with swap and RAM. Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s), so the whole article falls on its face.

> And then there were the secondary store, paper tape, magnetic tape, disk drives the size of houses, then the size of washing machines and these days so small that girls get disappointed if think they got hold of something else than the MP3 player you had in your pocket.

This is also written terribly.

[indymike]

> This article is a bit strange and conflates disk storage with swap and RAM.

The author is pointing out that many programs duplicate OS virtual memory functionality by paging temporary data to persistent storage and loading it when needed. This duplicates the operating system's built in virtual memory capability and has negative effects on the system. The whole idea of virtual memory is to allow a system to handle loads where memory allocated exceeds the size of RAM.

> Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s)

Modern linux does have swap, and it is quite useful. Proper support for swap is coming in k8s (looks like 1.23). Quite a few workloads need swap to run safely, so adding this to k8s will be an improvement.

> This is also written terribly.

Bad joke was bad.

[mondoshawan]

>> Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s)

> Modern linux does have swap, and it is quite useful. Proper support for swap is coming in k8s (looks like 1.23). Quite a few workloads need swap to run safely, so adding this to k8s will be an improvement.

Ah, I see the HN pedants have arrived. I was not claiming that Modern Linux does not have swap. Note the words "don't necessarily". I was claiming not all machines have swap.

Most of mine do not have it enabled, and I take effort to ensure on machines with 16GB or more RAM that it is disabled. I do run a K8S cluster as well, and those machines do not have swap enabled, not because K8S requires it to be off, but because having it on would be adverse to the health of the flash storage they use.

TBH, this is the kind of vapid pedantic response I've come to expect of the average of HN comments these days, and why I'm considering just not using it anymore at this point.

[daveslash]

It would have been funny if I was still 15. But then again, this article is from 2006; The blogosphere was a different place in those days, and I've matured since then as well - hopefully the author has too. Still: Bad joke was bad.