Return to BSD News archive
#! rnews 2948 sserve.cc.adfa.oz.au Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!lll-winken.llnl.gov!venus.sun.com!news2me.EBay.Sun.COM!engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM!logrus!ericvb From: ericvb@Sun.COM (Eric van Bezooijen) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Running X-Windows on 4 meg ram Date: 23 May 1995 02:11:30 GMT Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, CA Lines: 51 Message-ID: <3prg8i$r7d@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> References: <1995May20.170419.2519@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: logrus.eng.sun.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Josh Blumberg (jb011c@uhura.cc.rochester.edu) wrote: : I want to install FreeBSD on my computer, I have abaout $400 to : spend on upgrading my computer, I want to be able to run FreeBSD and : dos/windows... I currently have: : Leading Edge 486 SX25, 4meg Ram, 120 meg hard drive(IDE) : No external cache(can expand to 64k), SVGA monitor(512k vram) : I am an undergrad Comp Sci. major at the Univ. of Rochester. I can : set up a PPP connection at 19,200 baud to some high end Sparc work stations. : My idea was that I would by a new hard drive(I've found a 1.2 gig 9ms access : time for $300), split it giving FreeBSD about 500 meg... Make a huge 30 : meg. swap file... A 300 Mb swap file for a machine with 4 Mb of RAM ? That's an order of magnitude more than you will *ever* need with 4 Mb or RAM. I would spend your money on an extra 4 Mb of RAM, and get a smaller disk. -Eric : Here's the question, will I be able to get x-windows of the ground : with 4 meg ram and a huge swap file. - I am not sure what the story is for FreeBSD, but a lot of swap space *never* helps if you have almost no RAM. Your system will become useless once it gets beyond a certain point. It will start to thrash, and spend all of it's time paging in and out of disk, and will not spend any time doing any useful work. If you use 300 Mb of VM on a system with 4 Mb of RAM, 99.9999 % of system resources will be spent on paging. I figure since the Sparcs will be : doing all the work my ram will only be running the x-windows and OS. : Also I can afford a math-co or the external cache... how do you : think that money would be best spent? I figured I'd come to the experts : before I embark on a potentially hopeless venture. Buy 4 Mb of RAM. I have more experience with SparcStations, but I always find that more main memory helps performance the most (beyond a certain limit, of course). The curve is asymptotic, so in the beginning it *really* helps, and then the usefullness gradually decreases. Kind of like spending $$$$ on speakers. -Eric -- "I'm a smarty everyday!"- Beanie the Cerebrally-challenged bison, Animaniacs Eric van Bezooijen | "Faboo!"- Wakko Warner, Animaniacs [Warlord *THIS*] eric@csua.berkeley.edu | "Oh joy of Joys!"- Stimpson J. Cat, Ren & Stimpy eric.vanbezooijen@sun.com | "Spoon!"- The Tick [Pixies and Talking Heads rule!]