Re: new laptop specs: i7 CPU, graphics card, & RAM
On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:39:46 -0400
ken <gebser@mousecar.com> wrote:
> 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 and
> >
> > Stuff 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.
Indeed. I run lighttpd / mysql / wordpress, as a sandbox to test complex
posts before posting them to my production blog. I don't notice all
that stuff running, in general.
> >> 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 watch
> >
> > No 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.
I understand what you want, and I really don't know. I run NoScript,
Flashblock, Ghostery and Privoxy, which should help speed things up,
but lots of webpages still take some CPU time.
> >> 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.
Well, I rarely have pages that get seriously stuck (unless, of course,
I need to run Flash :(); they sometimes need a few seconds of CPU
time, but they generally straighten themselves out pretty quickly.
Celejar
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