From: wolff@liberator.et.tudelft.nl (Rogier Wolff) Subject: Re: 486 with 33 Mhz and 16Mb or 50 Mhz and 8Mb? Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1993 16:42:44 GMT
stoehr@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Peter Stoehr) writes:
>In article <THIELOPH.93Feb17101134@crypt5.cs.uni-sb.de>, thieloph@crypt5.cs.uni-sb.de (Christoph Thiel) writes:
>|> A friend of mine askes if he should by a 486 with 33 Mhza 486 and 16Mb or a 486
>|> with 50 Mhz and 8Mb. (He has not enough money for 50 Mhz and 16Mb.) He plans
>|> to use X11, TeX and gcc with Linux.
>Simple answer,
>X11 loves memory! That's the reason why he should buy a 486 with 33 Mhz.
> Peter
Right. Memory is about 1000 times faster than a harddisk. Thus if you manage
to get everything you need into memory you easily gain more (e.g. a factor of
two, because everything is in memory) than what you lose (25% performance
difference between 50MHz and 33MHz.) if you buy the slower processor.
My experience (33MHz 486) is that 8Mb is enough to run X windows. However
at that point you have almost no memory left to use as a file system buffer.
This has big impact on the systems performance. After I upgraded to 20Mb,
all my sessions remain swapped in, and after a while, gcc, include files
and everything I used gets "swapped" into memory, and the only disk
activity comes from the sync's that get executed every 30 seconds.....
Roger.
-- **** a 486 in V86 mode is like a VW buggy with a 6 litre V12 motor. **** EMail: wolff@duteca.et.tudelft.nl ** Tel +31-15-783643 or +31-15-142371