From: jwinstea@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.) Subject: Re: Coherent vs. Linux - a comparo Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1993 01:18:25 GMT
In article <gahC8z6x4.2Cq@netcom.com> gah@netcom.com (Gregg Hungerford) writes:
>jwinstea@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.) writes:
>>Most 386 owners are going to have something like 4-8 MB and about 150
>>megs of hard drive space (very similar to my setup). Having virtual
>>memory allows you to run large processes without sinking lots of money
>>into extra memory.
>
> The problem is that low end systems like that have a tendency to
>thrash. When that happens, you'll find yourself watching the disk
>constantly paging back and forth, tying up the whole system, while
>nothing happens.
Perhaps with an operating system that isn't geared to prevent
thrashing -- when I go into using the swap space on my machine, I
certainly feel it, but it does not grind to a halt.
>>Also, I understand that Coherent lacks a number of other virtual
>>memory-related things that make its memory usage far less efficient.
>>I can't imagine a system without demand paging and shared libraries.
>
>Again, I'm a fan of virtual memory. I started out in the 70's when
>job swapping was all there was. My point is that I think people have
>some false expectations. On a drive with 3 ms access, virtual memory
>is elegant. On a drive with 15 ms, it's clunky at best. I think a lot
>of people now (myself included) are using ide drives that fall into
>that category.
Right, but the things I mentioned (demand paging and shared libraries)
aren't dependent on the speed of your disk, really. In fact, they
would make things incredibly faster on a slower disk, because you're
loading less and sharing things you've already loaded.
Swapping on a 15ms or so IDE drive is not going to be fast - that's a
given. But under Linux, it's still acceptable when you need to push
the limits of your machines resource, such as running X, with a
kernel compile running in the background and a couple of things being
done in the foreground. It's certainly much cheaper than buying more
memory to be able to get things done without working in a serial
fashion (okay, wait for the compile to finish because it uses up all
the available memory...).
>>> XWindows is a great thing but it requires a lot of system. The mips
>>>machine I had came originally with 32 meg of ram. It ran so-so until
>>>I upgraded to 64 megs.
>
> Certainly the mips box had more overhead, but I think a system like
>yours would come to a grinding halt trying to run the volume and
>intensity of programs that I was running (including a FULL net news
>feed via uucp).
I'm sorry, I was misled by your original statement. I was talking
about just running X with a normalish single-user load. Something like
my machine is perfectly adequate for that, but not for the use you are
talking about. You're comparing apples and oranges.
>That's a matter of personal taste. I have all sizes of monitors on my
>systems and prefer the less imposing 14" screen. The problem with
>these smaller screens is a matter of clutter. The virtual screen setup
>that comes with coherent is easier for me than searching for and resizing
>windows all the time...
You can do the same thing with Linux. It supports virtual screens
quite handily, with mouse-based cut-and-paste between them. Pretty
slick, in my experience.
But back to the issue of running X on a 14" screen - with the virtual
screens available from most modern window managers (tvtwm, ctwm,
olvwm, mvwm, whatever) you don't need to search for and resize windows
all the time. I almost never do that, I just jump over to another
virtual screen.
>No it isn't. But it's often the case.
But not as often on Linux as on many other systems.
-- loveritablessencentipedependentalism+ Jim Winstead Jr. (CSci '95) andaterrificklengtherealityearguessy| Harvey Mudd College, WIBSTR mpathybridgenerationiceremonymphysic| jwinstea@jarthur.Claremont.EDU alendareadvertisexpresshothoughthend+ or jwinstea@fenris.Claremont.EDU