[ILUG] kde and memory

[Kevin Philp]

Well for peoples curiosity the machine has been running for the last few hours 
with its 512mb ram and seems to be flying it, I haven't noticed any slowing 
down... so I think issue solved. According to top the RAM used has slowly 
creeped up to about 400k. Looking at top for the server, which is on all the 
time I get. So I learn't something today! KDE is greedier than I 
thought....is Gnome as greedy?

Mem:    515336k total,   480336k used,    35000k free,    86788k buffers
Swap:   811272k total,   102752k used,   708520k free,   174168k cached

Kevin.

On Monday 30 August 2004 13:14, ray at skynet.ie wrote:
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Niall O Broin wrote:
> Given the price of RAM now, 512M isn't a huge amount to have in a
> desktop machine. I wonder how XP with Office XP, IE and Outlook behaves
> with 256M of RAM? I don't have such a machine available to test, and I
> don't really care, but I'm curious.

To satisfy Niall's curiosity:
for most "office" users typing up the odd word document for later mailing
off via outlook & then checking $WEBMAIL, the the above spec is actually
ok, however XP seems to suffer the same growing swap use problem as the
2.4 kernel & this tied to variable sized pagefiles with ye olde NTFS
fragmentation issues can lead to a constant perception of slowness after
a couple of months! XP does _need_ to be rebooted at least once week cause
if ya dont clicking start can lead to some excelent beard growing practice
before you can do anything productive.

Now
The second that the same user starts to do anything fancy within their
"environment" such as adding images / tables extra fonts etc etc etc to
word docs & in particular if they start using powerpoint then XP becomes
an absolute dog to use with just 256 mem.

Any serious XP based work which in my recent experience has involved those
heavy into their CAD (Autodesk & Archicad products) and Graphics manibulation
(Adobe products & Corel draw etc etc), realistically
requires at least a Gig of Ram to be useable, irrelevant of #CPU speed.

however from what I've seen / dabbled with,
a linux system with a 2.4 kernel seems to give performance comparable
to an XP box & the same hardware running a  2.6 kernel seems to perform
comparable to a win2k (pro) machine.

of course these comparisons are completely based on perception so take
with as much salt as you see fit!


ta
	Ray ...