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

[Paul Sture]

In article <e1fca8e7-4c0f-42eb-b018-bd4c6694fd02 at googlegroups.com>,
 johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk wrote:

> You're using Firefox (or similar) in only 512MB?
> 
> Firefox implies a relatively modern GUI-centric OS, right?
> 
> 512MB RAM (for both code and data) is not the typical design centre
> for a modern GUI-centric OS. It might barely be OK for the non-GUI variant
> of the same OS, but if you want a GUI, maybe you need to look at your
> choice of GUI and what you're using in it.
> 
> There are a variety of relatively lightweight desktop environments
> around with different window managers and apps, some of which are getting
> more exposure courtesy of lightweight Linux systems such as Raspberry
> Pi. Lightweight here means less heavyweight than KDE or Gnome etc.
> Potential candidates might included LXDE, Fluxbox, etc. If you haven't
> already done so, you might want to have a look around.

FWIW, my experience of running a variety of flavours of Linux as virtual 
instances[1] is that 750-800 MB is sufficient for reasonable performance 
when running window managers such as LXDE or XFCE.  If you add a web 
server and MySQL server, then increase that to 1000-1200 MB for adequate 
performance.  I don't know whether this is a common observation, but I 
have found that heavy swapfile use in Linux is more akin to heavy 
swapping in VMS than heavy paging in VMS (i.e. a painful hit).

> Firefox is known to be a particular memory hog in some versions (maybe
> most), probably it never discards anything once you've read it. Maybe
> that's the price you pay for not using Lynx any more?
> 
> We shouldn't really expect "modern" software to run well in
> resource-limited environments.
> 
> 
> 1980s: How do you tune a VAX?
> Add more memory.
> 
> 2000s: How do you tune a 512MB Linux system?
> Add more memory.
> (Or at least choose a lighterweight desktop environment).
> 
> 
> Apologies if you already knew all this, best of luck anyway.

[1] I am not sure how well this translates to physical machines. VMware 
claims that it can share library etc resources between host and client, 
and across clients, but that's probably only true where they are running 
the same flavour of OS (e.g. Windows), and the same version/patch level 
of said OS.

-- 
Paul Sture

IBM's Thomas J. Watson predicted a "world market for maybe five computers".
Given the way this whole Cloud thing is going, he might have been extremely
prescient.