James McKenzie wrote:
akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 01:59:43AM -0800, Mark Eggers wrote:
On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 22:49 -0800, John Wendel wrote:
I usually have a terminal window open, a web browser with multiple tabs,
Evolution mail, Pan (news reader), a system monitoring application,
Emacs, Netbeans or jEdit or Bluefish, and xmms. If I'm writing web
pages, I have IE running under Wine (Crossover Office) as well.
All this is done on a Dell 8200 with 768 M memory and a 60 GB hard disk.
The performance for a single person (me) is reasonable. I can even shut
down a lot of the stuff and play Unreal Tournament acceptably.
768 M of memory is a lot of memory for an average "slub" (a technical term) to have in their machine when they decide to run a FCx installation. I fully believe you have no memory or swap problem with that much ram memory. We have no particular memory or speed problem with 500M of memory on our machines. But below that things get dicey.
As I stated in another message, I run FC3 on a system with 384MB of memory. I don't hit max memory until run a Java based Torrent client for about an hour. It is possible to run FC3 on a less than optimal system, successfully. But the footprint of FC is growing and that is a disturbing trend.
And some problems cannot be solved by throwing more assets, such as memory at it.
I'm a little new to the linux scene in general, but I've installed and run a few distros a couple of years ago (rh 7.3 comes to mind) to learn some basic stuff. I'm sending this email from a windows box that I'm vnc'd into from a linux machine (500 Mhz P3 with 256MB of RAM and an 8gig hdd) while I concurrently have 1 more VNC session open to an NT4 box we're using as a print server at my office. I'm also running XMMS, several open tabs in a FireFox window, serving a printer as an SMB share for a network of windows machines, and running a terminal server right now to test out some routers I've got. Admitedly, none if this is terribly processor or memory intensive, but this machine is performing exceptionally better than a high end system (at the time, which meant a high end P2 or early P3) running rh7.3. Sure, firefox launches a little bit slow, but my mouse doesn't jitter, I can type at a steady rate, surf the web without pause and listen to my MP3's. Check out summary for my top:
top - 12:03:51 up 2 days, 16:26, 4 users, load average: 0.18, 0.16, 0.09 Tasks: 102 total, 1 running, 100 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie Cpu(s): 14.1% us, 6.6% sy, 1.3% ni, 78.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 256136k total, 252540k used, 3596k free, 13680k buffers Swap: 524280k total, 656k used, 523624k free, 69948k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3266 root 15 0 35416 26m 15m S 11.3 10.5 45:32.99 X 9355 jgreen 16 0 37528 13m 18m S 7.9 5.4 0:10.06 gnome-terminal 6754 jgreen 25 10 32488 19m 21m S 1.3 7.8 1:50.08 rhn-applet-gui 9792 jgreen 17 0 3276 1060 1784 R 0.7 0.4 0:04.32 top 6779 jgreen 15 0 18828 8104 15m S 0.3 3.2 0:08.97 gnome-netstatus 8835 jgreen 15 0 42244 6500 9148 S 0.3 2.5 0:04.50 xmms
considering all that I'm running at the same time, my load is low and I haven't even cut into my swap space. sure I'm down to 3MB of free memory, but aside from running OO.o I've got everything up that I need. If I wanted to drop my mem usage down a good 5-10% I'd run XFCE, but I don't need to because this handles everything fine. FC might need to trim down on some packages for a "core" installation, but I think most of the memory issues should be brought up with the respective programs.
I don't disagree that some programs are memory hogs, but any release of linux is mostly defined by what you run on top of it. If you like FC3, but don't like the fact that the release of gnome packaged with it is a memory hog, then you should be complaining to the developers of gnome. likewise with eggcups.
just my 2 bits.
-Joseph Green
ps - I don't think FC3 sucks, and with the current packages and kernel 2.6 it's actually run smoother for me than FC2 on all my installs.
