[GRLUG] swap benchmarking

[Michael Mol]

On 2/19/07, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/19/07, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I also see it benefiting older hardware where the RAM has been maxed
> > out, or where the necessary RAM is no longer readily available.  If
> > the system doesn't have USB2, one can add a $15 USB2 PCI expansion
> > card.
>
> So...  just playing devil's advocate...  what systems are you working
> with that have PCI, but no readily available ram?  Most 486s didn't
> have PCI (although I had a ULI chipset-based one that had PCI v1.0 -
> which almost nothing worked in).  They took 32 or 72pin SIMMs.  Some
> Socket 7 Pentium machines took 72pin SIMMs, most with the option to
> take 168pin SDRAM as well.  Since then, it's all been SDRAM, DDR
> SDRAM, and now DDR2.

>  In fact, the only systems I can think of that would be problematic to buy memory for
> since the Pentium 233 w/MMX would be the very few Pentium 4s that shipped with
> DRAM.  If you have one of those, you're better off buying a new sempron or celeron,
> motherboard, and DDR ram - you'll get away for slightly less than the cost of a similar
> amount of RDRAM.

I've got an old K6-200 sitting around that used 72-pin RAM.  The
processor is sufficient for a variety of intermittent activities, but
it's had a problem with swapping since before it was obsolete, even
when I was running WindowMaker under Linux.

Frankly, I'm amazed they still sell PC133 SDRAM.  I expected that to
go off the market a couple years ago.  I'm even more expectant now
that the soon-to-be de-facto OS standard will be Vista, which won't
even come close to running on systems with PC133.

There's still the case where the system doesn't support more than a
certain amount of RAM.  Take my K6-200; The mainboard won't take any
more than 192MB of RAM.  Normally, that would be a limiting factor for
a low-end home server.  However, let's say one wanted to run more than
one kind of server software.  With a limited amount of memory, one
software package is loaded in memory while the other is relegated to
swap.  The server sits idle for a while, then the other software is
needed and gets loaded into memory.

Cases like that are nonexistent in the server room, but are quite
possible for the Linux hobbyist.

Again, it's not supposed to be a RAM replacement, but a supplement.
And it's got a lower incremental cost, so it's helpful for low-budget
people like me.

-- 
:wq