Re: swap

[Joe Hart <j.hart@orange.nl>]

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Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
[snip]
>> I run several apps at the same time.  Currently there are 105 processes
>> running, although most are sleeping according to top.
> 
> Are you on i386 or amd64?  I'm wondering how memory gets packed when
> things are 64-bit instead of 32-bit; do some things take twice as much
> memory?
> 

I have both on this AMD64 system, but I find myself most of the time
using the 32 bit version of (ahem) Sidux.  Why?  Because the multimedia
codecs are available.  Although I have read that the new version of
ffmpeg can handle the windows media format, so it is possible that I
will abandon the 32-bit system for the AMD64.  I know that it will suck
more memory, just by the way the system is designed, but I think that
packages being compiled for a 64 bit system on a 64 bit system will work
at least marginally faster than packages compiled for 486, which is what
most of the packages are compiled for.

As for swap space, even in the AMD64 version of Etch that I have, it
doesn't need to use the swap (and it is the same swap partition).

> The only time I see swap is with an X browser.  Doesn't matter Konq,
> Mozilla/galeon/whatever.  link2 is OK.  
> 
Interesting.  You said you have 1GB of RAM.  I would think that you can
do an experiment by turning off the swap and seeing what happens.  Worse
case you'll have to reboot (I would think).

> In fact, it was poor browser performance (read inability to view some
> sites) that was the drive to buy my new box.  For everything else, my
> IBM 486 was more than adequate.  It annoyed me that I had to buy a new
> box to do something as simple as look at a weather map or satelite photo
> but onwards and upwards...

Yes, todays browsers are far more demanding, mainly due to the large
amount of media that they need to be able to handle.  HTML has also
gotten a lot more complicated, thus the rendering engines need to be
more powerful.
<rant>
I really dislike the way modern sites overuse the <div> and format
themselves so they only show a fixed resolution.  But there isn't much I
can do about it.
</rant>

Joe

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