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  • From: Aaron Brice <abrice2 AT cox.net>
  • To: Phil/CERisE/KG6MBQ <cerise AT littlegreenmen.armory.com>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: RE: [SM-Discuss] License Choices
  • Date: 23 Jul 2002 02:59:08 -0700

On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 00:09, Phil/CERisE/KG6MBQ wrote:
> Swap space is essentially unreclaimable. One must repartition
> things to do that.
> Hard disk space following an rm -r is instantly reclaimable.

You can use a swap file instead of a swap partition if you want to be
able to "borrow" from the swap space. But you need a gig of free hard
drive space to compile mozilla. What does it matter whether this is
space that you have to remember to keep free in /usr or whether it's in
a swap partition? Personally I like having the 1GB swap partition. I
can basically fill up /usr and not worry about a compilation filling up
the /usr partition, especially since my /usr is on my / partition and
bad things would likely occur if it filled up (I know, I'm a horrible
horrible person and I might as well be using WinME).

> However, the point about swap being invoked is speed. A computer
> lacking resources will struggle with having to swap things around
> instead of keeping BZFlag running at a usable speed. That's annoying.
> A severly underprivileged computer (e.g. 386) will take longer than
> forever as a result.
>

According to the tmpfs man page, "Likewise, programs requiring large
amounts of memory use up the space available to tmpfs." This implies to
me that tmpfs will not take up memory that could be used by BZFlag.
Anyway, it would be nice to run another test: run some sort of benchmark
utility while mozilla is compiling in tmpfs, and then run the same
benchmark while it's compiling in /home. Is there a linux equivalent of
Winstone or something?

> It's not about space. It's about memory and speed. Linux, once
> again, was meant for the 386s. It was meant to avoid the bloat and
> high system requirements that we've all come to know Microsoft and
> Windows programming for.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but my motto is "Screw people with 386's."
It's nice if something works on a 386 but it shouldn't affect any
decisions. You can get a fast computer for $300 now, sell that 386 to a
collector on eBay and get a computer that will compile gcc in less than
a week.

> I think it's fair to expect that a system that doesn't have the
> resources which Aaron's computer does will widen the gap on those
> numbers. A 5 minute gap is fairly significant. After all, it's nearly
> a quarter of the 18 and 1/2 which harried Nixon. ; )

Note that the five minute gap was partially due to comparing a full cast
to just the "make" part. Add in the time to download the source and run
configure and they're probably just about even. Since I'm assuming you
have a computer with lower resources, I'd be interested in your results
with the same test.

Aaron






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