--- Luke-Jr wrote:
...
- a crapload of RAM
Unless you use only very few applications at a
time, even 1 GB won't
be enough. I generally sit around 3 GB RAM
usage-- mostly swapped,
which kills performance.
Or you could just use less applications at once.
Hence "Unless you use only very few applications at a time".
Please do tell me, how is it anyone can use more than a few applications at a time? I've found that I am limited by having two hands each with five digits. I've not yet matered using a foot keyboard yet. With these 10 digits I have only two eyes to process the incoming information, all of which must be processed by a single CPU. Just how many tasks can one really successfully hope to accomplish with such a configuration? While it may be really cool to say you run 50 applications all at once, the truth is I suspect most of them are sitting idle most of the time and just using up RAM that could be made better use of by other more frequently used applications. Or if as you say, you are constanly swapping from cache you might look into organizing your work habits to minimize the caching, by finding the application that are getting cached and finding the ones that aren't used frequently but are not being cached out to disk.
Even when I'm working I rarely use more than a handfull of applications at a time.
I may have a single terminal up, with multiple tabs. Occasionally, I will have two terminals up with multiple tabs. I always have a mail client up, and it's usually the Mozilla suite, because I almost always have a browser up. When working I may have Openoffice up with several documents open and a spreadsheet to track time, GnuCash for maintainence of accounts, Gramps, the Gimp for doing graphics, and Quanta. Ocassionaly I'll have a chat client open. My KDE desktop never caches any of these applications. Granted some applications require mega memory, but most of us don't require 3+GB RAM. I use 512MB and that is more than sufficient.
I run Gnome all day on a laptop with only 384
MBs of RAM. It's my primary
work station and I never run into serious
performance problems.
Ditto here except I use KDE 3.3
Perhaps you only do one or two things at a time and don't have on average over 50 windows open?
Luke, you should consider joining AA (Applications Anonymous). ;')
$0.02, Brian JD.