From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262386AbTJNNUK (ORCPT ); Tue, 14 Oct 2003 09:20:10 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262404AbTJNNUK (ORCPT ); Tue, 14 Oct 2003 09:20:10 -0400 Received: from 81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk ([81.2.122.30]:46209 "EHLO 81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262386AbTJNNUH (ORCPT ); Tue, 14 Oct 2003 09:20:07 -0400 Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 14:20:59 +0100 From: John Bradford Message-Id: <200310141320.h9EDKx5r001589@81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk> To: William Lee Irwin III Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <20031014110820.GN16158@holomorphy.com> References: <20031014105514.GH765@holomorphy.com> <200310141101.h9EB10sB001460@81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk> <20031014110820.GN16158@holomorphy.com> Subject: Re: mem=16MB laptop testing Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Quote from William Lee Irwin III : > 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.