Re: mem=16MB laptop testing

William Lee Irwin III
2003-10-14T11:05:24Z

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.

-- wli