[sclug] Dell desktop for 175GBP inc. delivered - offer closes 2/11/2005

[Bob Franklin]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005, John Stumbles wrote:

> The si and so columns were a lot higher than when the system is just 
> pootling along.

The 'si' and 'so' columns are particularly high.  You don't really want it 
swapping at all (although a bit of background is usually inevitable) as 
that would probably suggest your active set is larger than your available 
physical RAM (and then you're thrashing, if it keeps up).  If you start 
swapping when you're doing something atypical (say spell checking), you 
can probably live with it; but if you're finding that the swapping is 
going on fairly heavily when you're just browsing the web or swapping 
between programs, you've got problems.

Adding more RAM will obviously mean you can work with a larger amount of 
general RAM and will minimise the amount of time you're waiting for 
applications to minimise and restore.

It is also the case that disk time spent paging is taken away from time 
available for normal disk access (so your browser paging is going to slow 
down writing files to the disk-based cache, etc.; the kernel's FS cache 
will be caching things probably in memory, too, so it's a balls-up all 
round).


I don't run a desktop on my Linux machine, so its figures are pretty 
useless in this context - out of 384MB RAM, ~218MB is cache, ~60MB is 
used actively and ~108MB is free (not bothering to round the KB -> MB!).

I would certainly get the system such that your normal day-to-day 
activities are not causing swapping.  Memory is pretty cheap these days, 
although I can understand not wanting to spend money on memory for old 
computers that can't be reused in new ones (fortunately all my PCs take 
PC-100/-133 RAM and I inherited a box of it).


On the subject of eBuyer - I know everyone has a horror story about every 
retailer, but I have had several appalling incidents with them and they're 
one of the few retailers I've not forgiven.  Making mistakes is one thing, 
but (at least at the time - back in February) being only able to contact 
them through their crummy eNotes system (and not being able to call them) 
was unacceptable.

[Especially annoying as I had ordered a 400GB external HD drive, desperate 
to get 40GB of DV footage off my laptop before going on holiday to Japan; 
I couldn't even get hold of anyone to cancel an order, while I was trying 
to order an alternative product from another supplier, I was concerned I 
might end up with two.]

This experience has been repeated with several people within our 
department at work (on personal sales - not business) and I think the 
feeling is pretty consitent.

   - Bob


-- 
  Bob Franklin <r.c.franklin at reading.ac.uk>          +44 (0)118 378 7147
  Systems and Communications, IT Services, The University of Reading, UK