On Thu, 2006-05-01 at 11:49 -0800, Brian D. McGrew wrote:
> I know this is the Fedora, not Java list; but I'm not getting any help
> over there!
>
> Speaking from a hardware standpoint, we distribute our systems on Dell
> PowerEdge 1800 Server machines and we're limited (by our own hardware)
> to 512MB RAM. It stands to reason that these machines don't have very
> beefy graphics support in them. Low end nVidia or ATI chipsets at best!
>
> We're doing some work in Java, running under Sun's JVM and driving the
> graphics card with images while the CPU is at a decent load. As our
> images grow in size the drawing slows down. The 640x480 stuff is good,
> the 1280x1280 stuff is alright but the 2048x2048 is unusable.
Just to make sure you are aware a that if you are using
TrueColor 16M colors 2048x2048x3Bytes = 12 MB per image
buffer. With 512 MB Ram shared between your OS and your
video card you are going to have memory contention issues.
It may help to reduce the memory allocated to the video
card to 4 MB and run the display at no more than
1280x1024 in TrueColor which requires 3.75MB of display
memory. Since your GPU and your Processor are using the
same RAM and your program is likely doing all the image
manipulation, it doesn't make much sense to rob the OS
of the memory resources. If the GPU is doing most of the
work then there would be a case for increasing the video
memory to 16MB, to reduce the amount of memory transfer
to the video area. If you are not sure how the program
uses the GPU or the memory, try messing around with the
amount of memory allocated to the video system in bios.
There have been a number of other good solutions
mentioned about shuting down non essential services
to further reduce processor load and memory
consumption. You may also want to experiment with using
different browsers, to find one that works satisfactorily
and uses as little memory as possible. Another thing to
look at would be drives with 16MB of cache for both swap
and storage of the images.
This brings up another question where are the images stored?
Are they on the hard drive, a local server on a 100bT
network or outside the network the machines are on?
>
> >From a hardware / (operating system) software standpoint, what would you
> do to speed things up? I can't add memory; we don't have any open slots
> to add in another graphics card and using a workstation model machine
> with better graphics isn't a choice either.
>
> Any ideas???
>
> TIA,
>
> -brian
>
> Brian D. McGrew { brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx || brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx }
> --
> > Those of you who think you know it all,
> really annoy those of us who do!
>
