[Info-vax] Running Alpha VMS under the ES40 emulator

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Saturday, 12 October 2013 13:18:53 UTC+1, Simon Clubley  wrote:
> On 2013-10-12, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> > On 2013-10-11 16:58, George Cornelius wrote:
> 
> >>
> 
> >> I'm finding that what it takes to almost completely freeze
> 
> >> up my 512 MB / 32 bit Linux system is to leave Mozilla up
> 
> >> overnight with multiple tabs open.  It pagefaults for what
> 
> >> seems to be a full 15 minutes at that point, and may still
> 
> >> be nearly unusable when it all unfreezes [OK, using an
> 
> >> external Seagate USB3 drive on a USB2 port for paging -
> 
> >> spinning at an unspecified RPM - but you get the picture].
> 
> >
> 
> > Probably because you have nightly stuff run by cron which runs over the 
> 
> > disk. That causes a lot of memory to be used for disk caching, pushing 
> 
> > all applications out to swap. Which in turn cause a lot of page 
> 
> > thrashing when you try to do anything, as programs have to fight the OS 
> 
> > to get a few pages back. There is a big tendency for memory to be used 
> 
> > as disk cache nowadays...
> 
> >
> 
> 
> 
> No, the real problem is that Firefox has become a bloated monstrosity. :-)
> 
> Running top or ps -axl while using Firefox can be very revealing.
> 
> 
> 
> I've got a freshly launched firefox instance running right now with 7 tabs
> 
> open and no other page history other than the initial Google home page.
> 
> top is reporting that it's currently comsuming 477Mbytes of virtual
> 
> memory, which is a insane amount of memory for a newly launched browser.
> 
> 
> 
> The tabs are normal HTML pages, such as Slashdot and the Register, with
> 
> Javascript disabled and no plugins (Flash isn't even installed for this
> 
> Firefox installation).
> 
> 
> 
> BTW, I find 512MB to be perfectly fine for a desktop Linux machine.
> 
> One of my systems is a old netbook with that amount of memory (it's highly
> 
> convenient when you want to drop it in a backpack) and it does everything
> 
> just fine. This is Scientific Linux 5.x with a Gnome 2 desktop.
> 
> 
> 
> The only problem I have with it is when Firefox has been running for a
> 
> period of time and I experience the same memory thrashing problems
> 
> described above but nowhere near as bad. Other GUI applications all work
> 
> just fine with it, BTW.
> 
> 
> 
> You shouldn't need 1-2Gbytes to run a web browsing desktop. Unfortunately,
> 
> there isn't any other browser around with Firefox's range of plugins.
> 
> 
> 
> Simon.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
> 
> Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

"You shouldn't need 1-2Gbytes to run a web browsing desktop."

Indeed you shouldn't. But when almost every Wintel box retailed in the last N years has had at least 2GB, more likely 4GB, there's not that much incentive
to keep things lean and mean.

It's a bit like when my first employer moved from an 11/40 (256KB) to an 11/70 (4MB). We started writing more programs in FORTRAN rather than assembler, 
because we wanted to be productive at writing software that did things, rather
than taking forever coding stuff in Macro11 so it would fit and "be efficient" 
on a long-obsolete box.

Firefox is still an example of particularly bloated software though.