Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!dcl-cs!aber-cs!odin!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: X11R4 for i386 Unix Message-ID: Date: 5 Jul 90 15:06:13 GMT References: <211741@<1990Jun22> <40800020@uicsl.csl.uiuc.edu> <1990Jul03.222233.1896@virtech.uucp> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 44 In-reply-to: cpcahil@virtech.uucp's message of 3 Jul 90 22:22:33 GMT In article <1990Jul03.222233.1896@virtech.uucp> cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes: The difference is "requires to work" as opposed to "requires for usefulness". X11R3 on any 386 system with less than 8MB will force the different processes to be swaped out. I ran one in this configuration with only 3 xterms, an xbiff, and an xclock. You could hear the disk fumbling around when I moved the mouse from window to window. This si again the result of poor swapper/page design. I cannot believe that the combined working sets of your processes was larger than 2-3 megabytes. Hey, I cannot believe that the *total* size of your applications was larger than that, even if xclock is rumoured to grow to 1.3 megs of address space... On my sun3 I have 2 xterms and 1 xclock, and two remote windows, and sizes are: SIZE RSS X 952 248 xclock 152 0 xinit 56 0 xterm 208 96 tcsh 104 80 uwm 120 32 xterm 216 112 tcsh 104 104 TOTALS 1912 672 i.e. well below two megs and a tad over half, and even given the great imprecision of such measurements, we are way below eight megs. The only explanation as usual is the catastrophic performance of the System V (and, incidentally SunOS, Ultirx, etc...) swapper (yes, on my 4 meg sun3 I get some swapping as well, as you see form the above 0 RSS entries...). Note that my X server is that big also because I have a large background bitmap. -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk