Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 23:57, Mike McCarty wrote:

> Loading OO took 24 seconds. So simply low RAM is not the complete
> answer. Exiting OO and then restarting it took about 8 seconds,
> which corresponds to what others have reported. So it looks like
> perhaps a disc bandwidth problem. But I don't know what the cause
> would be.

Might just be the best an older drive can do.  I'd guess that
bumping the RAM to 512M or more and switching to one of the newer
drives with 8MB cache would make that box 'feel' at least
4x faster.

> At 20 MB/s and achieving, say 20% actual throughput,
> 22.3% of 256MB is 57MB, which would take at 4 MB/s 14 secs. Hmm,
> actually not far off (<2x). I really did do that computation based on
> my experience with the disc throughput achieved on other systems
> I've used. Hmm. But flushing to virtual should only really double
> the time, and 2x14 is not *very* close to 58.

If you have to flush out real memory first, you have to factor
in the seek time and the swap partiton may not be nearby what
you are loading and it may thresh back and forth several times.
If you are just re-using cache you aren't forced to do a
write-back.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com