Re: [PLUG] Memory hardware questions

["Arthur S. Alexion" <arthur@alexion.com>]

On Saturday 06 July 2002 01:33 pm, Jason wrote:
> On Friday 05 July 2002 14H:42, Arthur S. Alexion wrote:
> > On Friday 05 July 2002 02:05 pm, Brian Epstein wrote:
> > > > believe it or not -- almost acceptable.  It is, however,
> > spending > > too much time swapping to disk.  I have limited memory
> > upgrade > > options --
> > >
> > > If you have an extra harddrive, you may try hooking that up to
> > your > second controller and putting swap exclusively on that
> > drive.  It may > speed up your computer (and would be cheaper if
> > you have an extra hdd > sitting around).
> >
> > I do have an extra one, but there is no space in the box for it
> > (currently 2 hdds, an internal zip and a cd take up all the space)
>
> I believe the recommendation here is to put the swap partition on a
> different disk than the partition that has most of the applications
> that you are running. This should improve the situation a little when
> you get into situations where the system is using the swap memory.
> This lessens the impact of the bottleneck (swap memory).

My current setup includes 2 physical drives.  The older 1 GB IDE drive 
holds the MBR and the windows system files.  The newer 40 GB PCI/ATA 
100 drive holds 2 or 3 more 2.2 GB windows partitions and Linux.  The 
default boot is Linux.  In theory, I could move the rest of windows to 
the ATA 40 GB drive, and use the old drive just for the MBR and swap.  
However, I've heard windows is touchy about not being on the boot 
drive, so will this cause more problems that it solves?


>
> Increasing memory should reduce the need to use the swap memory. This
> removes the bottleneck (swap memory) more of the time.
>
> Ideally, you want to do both. 128MB still probably  won't be enough
> for every scenario.

My needs are mostly business apps, not a lot of graphics and multimedia.

>
> Also, try to limit running GTK/Gnome and QT/KDE applications at the
> same time. For example, you probably don't want to have KMail and
> Gnumeric or Galeon running at the same time. Using Gnome and KDE
> applications at the same time will really suck up all of your memory
> and then some very quickly.

This is a good piece of advice I hadn't thought of.  I presume running 
both concurrently would cause them to load a piece of their 
environments too.

>
> OpenOffice is written in Java, which uses a JVM. That is fairly
> memory intensive as well.

Takes a really long time to load (probably starting the JVM), but runs 
fast enough after that.

>
> As others have said, shop around for memory prices. Probably not
> worth the prices Gateway is quoting, unless this is a notebook
> computer (it isn't, is it?).

I have since found 128 MB for under $35 at Edge Micro.



>
> HTH,
> Jason Nocks

Thanks for the info.  While a lot of what you mentioned now seems 
obvious, I hadn't thought of it before.

-- 

_______________________________
Art Alexion
Arthur S. Alexion LLC
mailto:arthur@alexion.com
http://www.alexion.com

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