Comments on: Favorite computer myths

By: Memory’s in the corners of my mind « Motho ke motho ka botho

Memory’s in the corners of my mind « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 03:36:21 +0000

[...] Memory seems to be on my mind more than usual these days. That probably started with the myth about more memory arbitrarily improving system speed, and continued with the purchase of a gargantuan chunk of memory around the same time. And then the [...]

By: Links 7/8/2010: OLPC XO Laptops, Growth of Free Software | Techrights

Links 7/8/2010: OLPC XO Laptops, Growth of Free Software | Techrights — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:18:20 +0000

[...] Favorite computer myths [...]

By: spc

spc — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:46:33 +0000

Congrats and keep it up mate

By: Debianero Rumbero

Debianero Rumbero — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:39:02 +0000

Use Debian GNU/Linux!

By: Sid Metzel

Sid Metzel — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:36:47 +0000

Personally, I like to have enough memory that swap will never be used (at least under normal circumstances).

By: demonicmaniac

demonicmaniac — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:26:45 +0000

About the memory myth.
Swap has already been mentioned but there’s another thing.
Filesystem caches and buffers. Memory never lays bare and it certainly speeds up file access if the data is cached and buffered. It’s the difference between waking up the disk for seek/read/write and a random memory access. Tweak your system with the background_ratio. Standard is something like 20 or so and 5 seconds writeback, push that ratio to a 70 or 80% and you only ever need to access the disk every few minutes instead of seconds. Memory makes a world of difference. One handy trick i use is fbgs, render a pdf into images and display them with frame buffer image viewer. have it render the images to /dev/shm tmpfs in ram and after the initial render you have instant access to each image and a memory to memory transfer instead of random seek. you can not have too much memory, ever.
my 2 cents

By: YankeeDDL

YankeeDDL — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:15:50 +0000

I’d like to add my 2 cents here, on the memory myth. I think we need to be a bit careful.
As recently as last year there were laptops sold with Windows installed and 512MB of Ram.
My personal experience says that the further you go back in time, the more likely it was to stumble across a PC with not enough RAM (my glorious 386DX had a ‘whopping’ 8MB when I bought it, and 96MB when I trashed it: the step from MS DOS to Win95 took a heavy toll on it. Looking back … how foolish!).
Even modern PCs that come with 2GB will easily slow to a crawl running Windows7 and few programs.
Yes, we’re talking about highly inefficient MS Windows here, but lower the bar a little and Linux will, eventually, stumble too (yes yes, the height of that bar will depend on the distribution).
My point being: it really depends on the conditions whether adding more RAM makes a difference (which is also what you said), but I have the feeling that those conditions apply to quite a lot, perhaps the majority of the PCs in use today.

Lastly, about noise and power consumption on old PCs: I have one more benefit to add to the fanless/quiet speech; a benefit that I discovered at my expense. Fans, like HD, and CD/DVD drives are the only mechanical/moving parts on PCs these days. If a fan breaks, it’s no fun (pardon the pun ^__^). Replacing the fan embedded in a heat pipe, scraping and replacing thermal paste from CPU, GPU and, possibly, chipsets … it’s not really for the faint of heart (or perhaps it is on some laptops … not mine
Oh, and did I mention the ‘soundtrack’ that comes with a slow death of a fan?

By: Kaleb Elwert

Kaleb Elwert — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:39:30 +0000

You try gentoo? Huge learning curve but it kept me going for a long while.

By: Zoev

Zoev — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:47:00 +0000

I’ve never had a Linux distro on either computer past 3months. Always hopping.

By: Kaleb Elwert

Kaleb Elwert — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:22:06 +0000

I would like to say that more memory can definitely increase the speed of a computer if you don’t have enough and the computer is constantly using swap. I know you, k.mandla already know this, I just wanted to point it out. I do know that adding more just for the heck of it will not speed it up, though, as your article is still valid.