[nylug-talk] LOWMEM vs. HIGHMEM performance advantage?

[Eric Moore]

Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com> writes:

> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 08:08:16AM -0700, Peter C. Norton wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:30:55AM -0400, jh wrote:
>> > I have an application that appears to slow down once it starts using 
>> > about 900 megs of memory.
>> > 
>> > Interestingly, from dmesg:
>> > 
>> > [42949372.960000] 1150MB HIGHMEM available.
>> > [42949372.960000] 896MB LOWMEM available.
>> > 
>> > Is HIGHMEM slower, or are there circumstances or kernel configs such 
>> > that I could be seeing such a slowdown once memory usage goes above a 
>> > certain level?
>> 
>> Are you using a 2.4 kernel? I thought the split was moved much closer
>> to the 4gb line in 2.6.
>> 
>
> Why do we still have this ancient DOS ritual?
>
> Ruben

Because our computers still have finite word sizes.

-- 
Eric