[rescue] Seeking opinions: change my desktop machine?

[John Floren]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Mike Meredith <very at zonky.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:10:12 -0500, John Floren wrote:
>> I should be able to grab another 512 MB from a system I've got sitting
>> around in the lab.
>
> That'll probably be the biggest win in terms of performance - 512MB is
> a little low for a modern desktop; in fact 1GB isn't exactly overly
> endowed.
>

Yeah, I haven't bought memory in about 8 years... still running the
original stick of 512 I bought when I first built the system.


>> Chrome or OO decide to get retarded (hey guys I'm gonna take 100% of
>> cycles OK?) I can't do *anything* because my WM can't get a word in
>> edgewise; I was hoping with 2 processors I'd get a little better
>
> Technically that's a bug (or possibly a misfeature) in the scheduler -
> a decent scheduler should allow other processes a fair share of the CPU
> even with one process trying to hog the CPU. For instance Solaris tends
> to remain more responsive than Linux in such situations.
>
> However a 2 CPU system should make things more responsive across
> multiple processes even if it makes a single process/thread slower.
>
> If your choice of window manager is something like Gnome or KDE, I'd
> have a look at some of the lightweight window managers (Enlightenment
> DR16, FVWM, etc.) --- that can make a big difference. If you're already
> using a window manager with manually generated menus, you can also try
> running heavyweight processes "niced" to lower their priority.
>

I think one of the problems is that when I'm running Chrome and OO and
other stuff, there's a lot of swapping going on (due to my lack of
memory, what happened to the days when 512 MB was a ridiculous amount
for Linux?).

Right now, I run StumpWM, but I'm finding that while it's nice for a
netbook, I may want to go back to something like 9wm on my desktop.

I really just need to buy a new desktop machine, but I think that will
wait until I get out of college.

John
-- 
"Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing" -- Rob Pike