CCL: help needed

 Sent to CCL by: "Perry E. Metzger" [perry~~piermont.com]
 "Arindam Ganguly arindamganguly^^^gmail.com" <owner-chemistry _
 ccl.net> writes:
 > could you suggest some more refernces where a clear distinction espcially
 in
 > terms of the diffrences between the architectural differences of windows
 and
 > lInux is highlighted. thanks,
 Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is hard. The problem is that issues
 like virtual memory subsystem architecture aren't any more easily
 understood by non-specialist than an ab initio computational chemistry
 system is easily understood by the non-specialist. Really
 understanding the issues requires that you have an operating systems
 class under your belt, or the equivalent.
 There are also a *lot* of different issues in performance differences
 between Windows and various Unix flavors, not just the VM
 subsystems. I picked that just because seeing the difference made
 there is particularly easy. there are many others.
 Anyway, trying to answer your point more directly:
 For Linux, there is apparently a book on the virtual memory subsystem
 -- you can find it by doing a google for "linux virtual memory". I
 have to admit, though, that the best way to *really* understand the
 architecture of the system is to look at the code and play with
 it. There is also some documentation that comes with the kernel
 sources themselves, including a bunch of stuff on tuning associated
 with the proc filesystem documentation.
 For NetBSD (the Unix I tend to use the most, but which I suspect no
 one here uses or will be using any time soon), there is a longish
 paper on the design of the VM subsystem, which you can find off of
 here:
 http://netbsd.org/Documentation/kernel/uvm.html
 Unfortunately, Chuck's original papers don't include a description of
 the way that the unified buffer cache works or the internal tuning
 mechanisms it employs. Those can be found out about in other pieces of
 system documentation.
 For Windows, the easiest way to learn about the VM system and its
 tuning is by reading through the MSDN documentation on the subject --
 the information from Microsoft's old NT architecture books is quite out
 of date at this point. The MSDN info is, however, quite opaque,
 including the obscure references to the several variables in the
 registry that you actually can flip to alter performance a bit. There
 are also some good open source tools to let you monitor Windows VM
 behavior in real time, including from www.sysinternals.com.
 Perry