[TriLUG] OT: hardware question

[Bill Vinson]

On Tuesday, March 26, 2002, at 08:26 AM, Andrew Perrin wrote:

> Sorry if this is too far off-topic.
>
> 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.  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.

The main question is what are you running in XFree86? GNOME, KDE, or a 
lighter weight window manager?  The newer GNOME and KDE versions can 
chew up memory very fast with all the bells and whistles.  I find with 
an older machine it is best to run windowmaker or blackbox (or something 
similar).   They will feel much more responsive and are quite nice.

> 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?

If you're running a large desktop environment, then yes you have the 
problem nailed.  If you're running something slim and light, then there 
is something going on.  BTW, one of the biggest issues I have found with 
my systems is that sometimes I don't run the drives with DMA access 
turned on.  This slows everything down as the CPU is taxed heavily for 
all disk access (including swapping).  Is your system/drive DMA 
compatible?  If so, as root try 'hdparm /dev/hda' (Insert correct disk 
in place of hda if that is not right).  What does it say DMA is set to?

> 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.

Unless you can find old SIMMs cheap on eBay then it is probably not the 
best use of money.

Bill