Is my computer under spec?

[Henry Miller]

>On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 00:35, Loren M. Lang wrote:
>> I have been having performance problems with my computer for months,
>> ever since I did a fresh install of freebsd 5.2.1.  I thought the
>> situation might change after debugging was turned off in RELENG_5 so
I
>> upgraded a couple weeks ago to 5.3-BETA7, but only saw slight
>> improvements.  I'm running Xorg, fvwm 2.4, several xterms,
vncviewer,
>> mozilla, xmms, and xine and my system was really running slow.  At
some
>> point mozilla was killed because the system was out of swap space.
I
>> have a pentium celeron 3 600 MHz, with 128 megs of ram, 30 gig hd,
256
>					 ^^^^^^^^ oh the inhumanity!!
>
>This is why you system sucks. It's swapping like mad. Xorg (on my
>system) weighs in a 50-70 MB, Mozilla will tip the scales in that
range
>easily as well. Xterm-static comes in at 3-5MB each. If programs get
>killed because of swap space, more ram will save the day. Or more swap
>space, but in your case I say more ram.

Note that X maps the memory of your graphics cards, which means it
shows up as using more RAM that it really is.   I still have a system
with 128 megs of ram, 256 swap, and the only time I've hard problems is
when I was running two different versions of KDE.  (as in KDE stable on
vt 8, and kde-CVS on vt9 while doing compilers and other work)  

More swap would help.   Konqueror seems a little more light weight to
me, but you would have to try it to see if it helps for your usage.

You can add more ram, but considering the age of that system it really
isn't worth the cost.   I don't know what that system takes, but in
many cases old RAM isn't made anymore, so when  you can buy it (supply
and demand) you pay far more than it is worth.   Either see if someone
else has an old system who can send you ram, or spend your money on a
new computer.  A cheap clearance system may come in at not much more if
you shop around.   I'd recommend saving my money for the new system.