Quotes from Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci

John Hennessy and David Patterson: they are titled Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (both published by Morgan Kaufmann).

system that is paging is writing selected, infrequently used pages of memory to disk,

while a system that is swapping is writing entire processes from memory to disk.

Paging is not necessarily indicative of a problem; it is the action of the page scanner to try and increase the size of the free list by moving inactive pages to disk.

Memory is consumed by four things: the kernel, filesystem caches, processes, and intimately shared memory.

processor performance doubles roughly every eighteen months, but memory performance doubles roughly every seven years.

Caches are organized into equal-sized chunks called lines.

Linux addresses this issue by adopting an empirical rule related to the processor's cache size: the larger the processor's cache, the longer a process will wait for a piece of time on that processor.

Every LWP has a kernel thread, but every kernel thread need not have an LWP:

Buses implement either circuit-switched or packet-switched protocols.

NCA uses a kernel module to transparently cache static web content in a kernel memory buffer, and replies to HTTP document requests for documents in its cache without ever waking up the application web server.

second, the memory cycle time, describes how frequently you can repeat a memory reference.