B news 2.11 patch 18 considered harmful

[was-John McMillan]

In article <392 at gnosys.UUCP> gst at gnosys.UUCP (Gary S. Trujillo) writes:
>Recently, the following was posted:
:
>...                                                Worse yet, rn goes crazy
>when there's such a wide article-sequence spread (runs out of memory on my
>2 meg machine, in fact).

	There is little relationship between having 2 Meg of RAM and
	running out of memory: Virtual Memory means not having to say
	"You're outta RAM" -- you're just out of Virtual Address [VA] space
	or out of SWAP space.  While it's possible your program porked
	itself up to the 2.5 MB limit, it's more often the case that
	swap space has been exhausted.

	The UNIX(r)-pc kernel requires SWAP space to be allocated for
	all VA space -- and reports "Out of Memory" if SWAP's not available.
 	(SVR3, on the other hand, only USES SWAP, it doesn't allocate
	if -- if my brainstem is recalling things correctly.)

	If you're wasting masses of address space on non-existent entries
	... [ obvious comments deleted ].

john mcmillan	-- att!mtunb!jcm -- just muttering for SELF, only... not THEM