[rescue] G4 pricing

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 07:48:05PM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote:
> On 17 Aug 2006, at 19:27, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> [...]
> > Page to a RAMDISK is redundant.  Turn off swap instead.  I've done it
> > with good sucess on numerous linux systems.
> 
> Sure, but that's Linux - but it *does* help some of the really crummy  
> versions of that ugly graphical shell atop a glorified program loader.

I hadn't considered the legacy windows operating system.
 
> In any case, disk is cheap and you might as well have loads of swap  
> on a Linux box and use it to back tmpfs on /tmp, /var/spool/exim4/ 
> cache and so on.

Sure, that makes sense for very high memory usage systems and servers,
but I'm not sure it makes sense for desktop systems with sufficient ram,
and I'm pretty certain it isn't a good idea when using flash file
systems and/or semi realtime systems.

Something I'm doing is having a startup script copy certain applications
from flash to a tmpfs.  I'm not sure what good this really does though,
other than manking it easy to copy a new version of the application onto
flash without stopping the running version.  I think I had some idea
about ensuring than any part of the application was already in ram
incase any pages of it got dumped.  But that was probably just crazy
thinking. 

I do have swap on my laptop, although I'm tempted to turn it off when on
the battery.  I turned it off on 1 gig desktop machine for
experimentation purposes.  And I have it turned off on a bunch of 2 gig
video processing machines.

I suspect that turning it off would be a good idea on many OSs when
running audio and/or video applications, but I don't know that for
sure.  If I ever had a Mac with sufficient ram, I certainly would give
it a shot.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/