>
> You _must_ avoid swap at all costs here. You may not understand the
> point, so a little more explanation: touching swap is several orders of
> magnitude more expensive than anything else you are doing in your program.
>
> CPU operations are on the order of nanoseconds. (10^-9)
>
> Disk operations are on the order of milliseconds. (10^-3)
>
> References:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_characteristics
>
>
To visualize the sheer scale of the problem, see:
http://i.imgur.com/X1Hi1.gif
which would normally be funny, except that it's not quite a joke. :P
So you want to minimize hard disk usage as much as possible. "Thrashing"
is precisely the situation you do not want to have when running a large
analysis.
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