Old 486 computer & external CD reader advice needed

Rickey Moore wayward4now at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 2 16:40:28 UTC 2006



--- Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Rickey Moore wrote:
> >>I wonder what could be done to speed Linux/X up?
> > 
> > 
> > for the games and video. whatchothink, Ric
> 
> I suspect that most of the slowness for *my* computer has nothing
> to
> do with that so much as that Linux eats memory like there is no
> tomorrow. So loading *anything* requires retiring a bunch of cache
> or
> swapping virtual memory. My CPU is hardly ever loaded more than
> 20%,
> and usually much less than 10%. When it is slow, I hear the disc
> going nuts.

I hear you Mike, as I said my old 486/66 with 16 megs of ram and 16
megs of swap, doing all of the serving that it did, I ran the old
Netscape Enterprise server (really nice too!), a Palace Chat, MudOS,
sendmail, ytalk, webpages, and a BBS package, 4 modems and the two
dickens terminal servers, ran at least as responsive as my k5 AMD
with 128megs of ram and 128megs of swap does now. Something is really
consuming the machine and I am not expert enough to know if it's my
own setup or what. Like I've said before I've been out of touch for
quite awhile, and when I installed Fedora this LVM thingie pops up
and I'm wondering just what the heck another layer of 'stuff' between
me and ext3 is actually good for, when I'm not running RAID or a
networked harddrive farm. Just 10 gigs of harddrive space between two
drives, is more management actually needed and is there a performance
penalty for a simple single client machine? 

So, for us 'users' who are not code developers, and who would
actually like to play a Dvd or game or any other app that doesn't
require networking, or server tasks all the time, would something
like my proposed level 4 be a benefit? Lotta new stuff I'm learning
and see alot of the old problems. ALSA ( just what the heck is it
really good for?) ran nuts and ate somewhere in the neighbor hood of
70% of my system resources (according to 'top') when I set it to full
duplex. Now it's down to around 2 to 3%, which I still consider high
as it should be dead, unless called upon by an app in the manner of
OSS, in the old days as a module. ALSA stays alive for most of the
time. Is this a good thing? Maybe we need to start a new thread "How
to trim the fat" Ric





 

================================================
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
   ...the Sin of Ignorance, and 
   ...the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.

Linux user# 44256
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