On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 05:43:48PM -0400, Charles E Taylor IV wrote: > > As an example, I've got a 128MB Sony Vaio running FC2, but I wouldn't > > entertain the idea of trying to run openoffice on it. > > Last time I tried, I walked to the neighboroughing room, started it up > > on my desktop, viewed the document I'd been emailed and walked back > > to the laptop before it had even started. > > Sure that's not just a slow disk drive? Upgrading my Thinkpad X20 (2000 > model laptop) from its old 10G 4200RPM drive to a 40G 5400RPM drive > basically halfed Open Office's startup time. That's a contributing factor yes, but the fact is that even once its loaded, there's not enough RAM available to keep OO's working set around, which means pretty much every operation you do hits the disk. Click pulldown menu <wait a while for menus to paged back in from disk> select something, <wait for that code to page in> go back to editting document, whoops part of it got paged out, <wait a while> etc.. Watching vmstat whilst this is going on is painful. > Upgrading the memory > didn't change the startup time measurably, but was helpful in > working with a couple of my really large documents. The other laptop I have has a similar spec drive, and twice as much RAM. One is usable for OO, one isn't. Go figure. > (This is on FC1, by the way. I need my Lucent winmodem and my minimal > Mach64 3D acceleration too much to toy with FC2 just yet :) ) FC2 does seem to make this problem a little more obvious. Whether thats userspace bloating over time, or a regression between the 2.4 & 2.6 kernel is yet to be determined. The 2.6 VM/IO layers are vastly improved over 2.6, but there are things it still doesn't get quite right. It's still rather reluctant to purge caches when needed on occasion for example. Dave
