[TriLUG] OT: hardware question

Chris Hedemark chris at yonderway.com
Tue Mar 26 08:58:24 EST 2002


Andrew Perrin writes:
> Sorry if this is too far off-topic.

Not at all.

> I've got an old machine into which I'd like to breathe some new life. It's
> a Pentium 200, and runs debian fine including X.

I've got a pile of Pentium 133 boxen.  With an upgrade to 32MB they are
pretty darned good.

> It does get slow,
> though, and when I use top to figure out why, it looks like the real
> bottleneck is memory; it's got 96M. When things get slow, load average
> gets to around 1.3 and the top CPU hog is generally kswapd, which makes me
> think it's actually the swapping that's taxing the system.

If you're at 96MB RAM and swapping a lot, there is something else going on.
That is a lot of memory (I know, not for a new machine, but remember the
vintage of the machine).  I would first look at what daemons are running,
and are they really necessary.  Also if you haven't already, rebuild your
kernel with only the stuff you need.  Lastly, a question, what desktop or
window manager are you running?

> So... I'm thinking of adding some memory to the system. A couple of
> questions:
>
> 1.) Does this sound like a reasonable way to handle it, given the
> situation I've described?

No.  Your machine is well configured for its vintage.  I would look at
putting the software on a diet before bulking up the hardware any further.

> 2.) Is there any sensible way of figuring out the biggest SIMM the
> motherboard will accept? Currently it's got two 32M and two 16M SIMMs; I'd
> like to replace the 16M's with 128M's if the board will handle it, so I'd
> end up with a total of 320MB. I don't have the MB documentation anymore,
> and the company I bought it from (for whom I used to work) is now
> bankrupt.

I've been able to find specs for old hardware on the web and through
Google's cache pretty successfully.  If you haven't done so, try doing a
search.

I've had pretty good luck on older hardware, if I'm being lazy, just rolling
back to an older distro.  For example Red Hat 6.2 is much nicer on my old
boxes than 7.2 (which won't even install without more memory).  6.2 was a
very solid distro, IMHO, and I'm not really losing much by going that route
but I am gaining a lot in terms of saved resources.




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