How little memory can we get away with
Hi I've just installed Suse 7.2 on one of our 'scrounged' machines. The machines are 200MHz pentiums with 3Gb hard discs but only 32Mb RAM. During the installation I assigned the entire hard disc to Linux (letting Yast2 apportion boot root and swap) and installed the 'default with office' option - i.e. shed loads of stuff that we probably don't need :) Everything seems to work ok, but the KDE desktop frequently grinds to a near halt on redraws - you can see the screen slowly redraw on bit-blit operations, and the redraw is accompanied by a lot of disc thrashing. As a performance indicator, those who remember ARM 2 Archimedes redrawing in screen mode 21 won't be far off the mark. So, I disabled all services which I suspected we didn't need, to save on memory, however there seems to have been little or no performance improvement. Things get worse when running Star Office, which I guess is the biggest thing we would want to run. So, the question is: I'm I wasting my time trying to get KDE2 stuff working on a 32Mb machine, or can anyone point me at some tweaks that will make these machines useful? Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Phil Driscoll wrote:
Hi
I've just installed Suse 7.2 on one of our 'scrounged' machines. The machines are 200MHz pentiums with 3Gb hard discs but only 32Mb RAM. During the installation I assigned the entire hard disc to Linux (letting Yast2 apportion boot root and swap) and installed the 'default with office' option - i.e. shed loads of stuff that we probably don't need :)
Everything seems to work ok, but the KDE desktop frequently grinds to a near halt on redraws - you can see the screen slowly redraw on bit-blit operations, and the redraw is accompanied by a lot of disc thrashing. As a performance indicator, those who remember ARM 2 Archimedes redrawing in screen mode 21 won't be far off the mark.
So, I disabled all services which I suspected we didn't need, to save on memory, however there seems to have been little or no performance improvement. Things get worse when running Star Office, which I guess is the biggest thing we would want to run.
So, the question is:
I'm I wasting my time trying to get KDE2 stuff working on a 32Mb machine, or can anyone point me at some tweaks that will make these machines useful?
IMHO yes. When I was running a workstation with only 32M I discovered icewm. It will even work ok in 16M (probably not with xfree 4, though). I now have 128M but I still use icewm. It is just as usable as KDE, much easier to configure (when you know where to look) and *much* quicker loading. It just leaves out the pretty bits you get with KDE etc. Star Office is pretty heavy on resources too. It will run in 32M but I wouldn't bother except to prove it. With KDE2 and Star Office together you will certainly need to go to at least 64M and to get good performance I would aim at 128M (RAM is cheap now). HTH ____________________________________ Giles Nunn - Network Manager Carms Schools ICT Development Centre Tel: +44 01239 710662 Fax: 710985 ____________________________________
Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
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On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 02:25:31PM +0100, Giles Nunn wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Phil Driscoll wrote:
So, the question is:
I'm I wasting my time trying to get KDE2 stuff working on a 32Mb machine, or can anyone point me at some tweaks that will make these machines useful?
IMHO yes. When I was running a workstation with only 32M I discovered icewm. It will even work ok in 16M (probably not with xfree 4, though). I now have 128M but I still use icewm. It is just as usable as KDE, much easier to configure (when you know where to look) and *much* quicker loading. It just leaves out the pretty bits you get with KDE etc.
Star Office is pretty heavy on resources too. It will run in 32M but I wouldn't bother except to prove it. With KDE2 and Star Office together you will certainly need to go to at least 64M and to get good performance I would aim at 128M (RAM is cheap now).
I'd agree with Giles. If you need to run office-type software and a desktop environment then you need more memory. But have you thought of what else you could use them for? I'm thinking X-terminals or for a firewall or DNS or mail or news service. If it's for school kids introduce them to the pleasures of a lightweight window manager (I use blackbox) and apps such as vim, lynx and LaTeX. There are other ways to go which are more rewarding than bloatware IMHO, which don't require state of the art hardware and from which kids would learn a lot. -- Frank *-------*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-------* | Boroughbridge | Tel: 01423 323019 | PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 | *-------*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-------* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/
On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Frank Shute wrote:
So, the question is: I'm I wasting my time trying to get KDE2 stuff working on a 32Mb machine, or can anyone point me at some tweaks that will make these machines useful? IMHO yes. When I was running a workstation with only 32M I discovered icewm. It will even work ok in 16M (probably not with xfree 4, though). I now have 128M but I still use icewm. It is just as usable as KDE, much easier to configure (when you know where to look) and *much* quicker loading. It just leaves out the pretty bits you get with KDE etc. Star Office is pretty heavy on resources too. It will run in 32M but I wouldn't bother except to prove it. With KDE2 and Star Office together you will certainly need to go to at least 64M and to get good performance I would aim at 128M (RAM is cheap now). I'd agree with Giles. If you need to run office-type software and a desktop environment then you need more memory. But have you thought of what else you could use them for? I'm thinking X-terminals or for a firewall or DNS or mail or news service.
From my experience, 32MB is easily sufficient for a thin-client terminal but not much else these days, if you want to use it as a desktop machine.
Michael
Star Office is pretty heavy on resources too. It will run in 32M but I wouldn't bother except to prove it.
Under windows I find 128 meg is a sensible minimum for StarOffice - worked with 64 but slow. Last time I looked 128 Mb SDRAM was around the £14 mark so as long as the machines take it its worth doing. StarOffice on Linux thin clients works fine with far less RAM but then you need it in the server. regards, -- IanL
participants (5)
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Frank Shute -
Giles Nunn -
Ian Lynch -
Michael Brown -
Phil Driscoll