Re: mem=16MB laptop testing

John Bradford
2003-10-14T13:20:10Z

Quote from William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>:
> At some point in the past, I wrote:
> >> (g) X isn't terribly swift; it's slower than I remember old Sun IPC's
> >> being, though they had 24MB RAM. OTOH luserspace is much more
> >> bloated these days. zsh alone is at least 3 times the size of
> >> ksh, which I used back then. fvwm2 is a lot bigger than fvwm1.
> >> And so on and so forth. I guess the upshot is "unbloating" the
> >> kernel wouldn't do much good anyway, since luserspace isn't in
> >> any kind of shape to run in this kind of environment anymore either.
>
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 12:01:00PM +0100, John Bradford wrote:
> > Depends on what you consider usable. I thought X worked pretty well
> > in swapless 8MB last time I tried it, (last year, around 2.5.40).
> > Admittedly that was only running a few xterms locally. A 4MB + 20MB
> > swap box was suprisingly usable for fairly intense remote applications
> > over a compressed 9600 bps serial link.
>
> It's not that it's particularly unusable, it was merely substantially
> slower than vaguely comparable machines I remember from way back when.

Ah, OK. Quite possibly my subjective observation was biased, simply
because I was expecting it to perform badly :-).

John.