On 10/27/2013 09:10 AM Celejar wrote:
On Sun, 27 Oct 2013 08:45:33 -0400 ken <gebser@mousecar.com> wrote:At long last it's time for a new laptop. I'm planning to run a lot on it: at least 3 VMs (Windows, Linux, and Mac) under virtualbox. plus server stuff like apache, MySQL, a CMS or two (likely drupal andStuff like apache, MySQL and WordPress will use virtually no resources when they aren't doing anything, so your question is really unanswerable without information as to what, exactly, those services will be doing?
Understood. At the same time, there is no way for me to say what exactly those services will be doing. The future is always kind of murky. So we're forced to speak in somewhat vague generalities. Perhaps I should have mentioned that, since it is a laptop, it's not going to serve as a production webserver, but rather for testing. And you're right that apache, MySQL, and wordpress themselves demand very little from a system. My 1.5GHz CPU handles them all quite easily. It's really some of the workstation apps that suck down the CPU sometimes to a crawl.
wordpress) in addition to a lot of 'workstation' kinds of apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP (on large photos), music- and other audio-players, video player (to view movies on DVD), etc., etc. on the Linux VM. In other words, there'll be a whole lotta stuff running on this machine. And I want it to be responsive... not just "pretty good" and definitely not sluggish. On my current (nearly ancient 1500 MHz) laptop running Linux, I can do everything "pretty good", except that when watching movies on it the sound and video get out of sync and when I browse to some particularly hoggish websites, the CPU load goes up to 4 or 5 or 6 or more. I don't want that to happen on the Linux VM on the new laptop... or on the other VMs either. So does anyone here run something like this? If so, what CPU and graphics card does your system have and how much RAM does it have? Does it run "pretty good"...? or slow...? or does everything come onscreen the split-second the finger leaves the mouse button? Can you watchNo idea what your current setup is like, but on my Core 2 Duo (2 GHz) system, running a relatively stripped down (although not a hard-core minimalist) setup it is certainly not the case that "everything come [s] onscreen the split-second the finger leaves the mouse button", and I doubt this is the case even with fairly beefy systems.
At some point, after throwing enough hardware and decent code at an executable, it's eventually going to run (how, it seems, *all* the ads say) "Blazingly Fast". The question is, how much hardware is needed to get to that point. Since my own system is by no means the fastest around and I haven't used a faster one in quite awhile, I have no idea how much hardware. That's what I'm here to find out.
What I've often noticed on my current system is that, when, e.g., a webpage is loading quite slowly (Facebook, for example), it's the CPU which is the bottleneck, not the network, not swap, not the speed of the hard drive. So this is obviously what needs improvement. Well, the graphics card could bear some responsibility, but I don't know how to measure its load/capacity.
movies and have the video and audio stay in sync? Does everything on the web come up fast, or do some pages take awhile to render?I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there will always be "some pages that take awhile to render".
I would say that too. Given the web is such a huge collection of webpages, it's a pretty safe bet that someone's going to put something out there which is bloated beyond what is practical for all but few to read. We could say this even if we had a web client running on a 1024-node beowulf cluster.