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[Nix]

On 6 Nov 2009, dylan at dylan.me.uk verbalised:

> On Friday 06 November 2009, Peter Corlett wrote:
>>
>> I avoid Windows due to it being fatally flawed in many ways, but
>> uptime is not one of them.
>
> Oh be serious - every Windows installation I've ever used runs slower and 
> slower the longer its up until it grinds to a halt.

Of course, this was true of Linux until fairly recently, from a UI
perspective: screen display ran slower and slower until you switched
virtual consoles away from X and back again. The cause was fragmentation
in the cache in video memory used to store glyphs used by the Render
extension. There was a fallback to using main memory, but still in the
end you needed to read from video memory and write back on *every* glyph
displayed. A defragmenter for the glyph cache fixed it.

Note: the problem wasn't the Linux kernel at all, but software atop the
kernel; said software worked fine when it was written, but with
increasing use of the render extension, the lack of a defragmenter for
that cache started to bite. The same sort of thing could well be true of
Windows, but it's so opaque that it's pretty much impossible for us to
tell, or to do anything about it if we figured out the cause.
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