Re: swap

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:00:50PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
> Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
 
> > To generalize the problem, given that the software can't be changed, at
> > what point do you start to look at either a bigger single computer or a
> > cluster that looks like a bigger computer?  For me its just an
> > intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
> > with 1GB in a single bound.  That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
> > up.
 
> Xorg swaps with a GB? I run Xfce with 512MB and I rarely see swapping;
> even on my 196MB machine I didn't see much swapping. What else are you
> running besides X?
> 

Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq.  I ususally use Xfce but have
tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq.  Try this site:

http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma

Then click on "Our Team".

I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
racking up the memory.  When I leave the site, the memory footprint
doesn't shrink.  Eventually, I just exit X and startx again.  Not that
it thrashes, but...

Before I tried to upgrade my 486, it was running Sarge but needed the
version 3 xserver-s3.  I ran icewm and ssh'd to the Athlon box (running
Etch) and ran Konq via ssh.  Worked fine.  486 has 32 MB ram, S3 has 1
MB video ram.

Since the 486 upgrade didn't work, I reassembled my PII box (called
rocky since the CPU fan bearing is dead and sounds like a gravel truck),
installed Etch, with Xorg.  It has 64 MB ram, the Trident video has 4 MB
video ram.

Eventually (almost immediatly on that site), Xorg hogs so much memory
that the box starts thrashing then totally freezes up: Ctrl-Alt-BS does
nothing (even after waiting an hour), ssh in doesn't work.  All I can do
is pull the plug.  This is with just Xorg running on the PII with Konq
running on the Athlon via a ssh link.

I has been my sad experience that the focus on development seems to be
on supporting the latest and greatest with no focus on continuing
support for earlier and lesser (by some measures), and sometimes quality
takes a back seat to a feature/support list.  This seems most to refer
to stuff outside of debian's direct control: debian doesn't write the
kernel, doesn't write Xorg.  However, they did make aptitude that grabs
(on the i386 PII) 57MB of virtual memory.

I really liked woody.  My 486 ran like a dream.  The problem is that
it's always onward and upward if you want to maintain security support.
The 486 (called reliant since its a solid IBM [inside _and_ out] that
has been going strong for 16 years) is both a client of the other boxs
(since its drive is small and its slower) and the toolbox for when
things go wrong on other boxes:  full man pages, HOWTOs, docs for
everything, serial terminal support, its own modem, exim4, mutt, X, text
and graphical browser, etc.  So it has to be up-to-date should I need it
to access the internet directly and act as a firewall if I have to
reinstall one of the other boxes.

My Athlon is only 6 months old so hasn't earned the respect I have for
the IBM.  So I'm experimenting with other OSs for the 486.  NetBSD works
ok but uses Xfree86 V4 so I can only use the vesa driver for the s3; it
doesn't have the drive space to get into the packages/ports stuff.
Next, I'll try OpenBSD 4.0 since it has both v3 and v4.  OBSD 4.1 just
came out and I don't know what its support is like.

Sorry for the rant.  Thanks for listening.

Doug.