The yearly on-campus technical conference has just wrapped up for anotheryear, so it seems a good time to write down my rules of thumb forpicking what conference talks to go to, in the hopes that I'll rememberthem for next year. (This year, I only remembered them about halfwaythrough.)

First, I should note that this is about picking interesting talks, notrelevant ones. With rare exceptions, I don't go to talks at our localtechnical conference to be educated,

On modern machines, the temptation is to make heroically big swap sizes;you'll hardly notice giving your swap 5G or 10G, and it means that youcan just forget about the whole worry that you've madeit too small. But this can be counterproductive, because too much swapcan be dangerous.

The problem with a too large swap is that it lets your system thrashitself more and more into overload, instead of outright exploding andthen recovering. When a system is overloaded enough,