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From: es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: What to buy??(numbercruncher)
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.203338.23645@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 91 20:33:38 GMT
References: <fv5H7bfy@cs.psu.edu> <1991Jun17.172930.13518@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <nd8H?xjy@cs.psu.edu>
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In article <nd8H?xjy@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
>
>In article <1991Jun17.172930.13518@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:
>
>   >Memory is cheap, but Mathematica can use more than 9MB of RAM.  Get a
>   >computer with virtual memory.
>   >
>   >-Mike
>
>	   And wait for it to page in and out? When memory is
>   $60/meg? What's the point? So get 18MB if you need that much. The
>   time it saves you (if you need it) makes it more than worth the
>   cost.
>
>The problem is you don't know how much you will need.  People run some
>pretty large Mathematica jobs.  I'm willing to bet there are times
>when 32MB of RAM is not enough.  Besides, if a job is running for
>hours you don't want to find out half way through that it ran out of
>memory.  Let it page to disk.  If you are using the machine for
>something else the CPU will be given to another task while the system
>is paging.  Then there is the case where you actually want to use your
>system when Mathematica is running.  Fire up that word processor and C
>compiler(well, I wouldn't do that w/o a little memory protection).
>
>BTW, RAM is down to $40/meg, and the price of 4MB SIMMS is rumored to
>be ready to drop again.
>
>-Mike

	IF the person we're giving advice to may really need more
than 18MB of RAM, then probably the Unix machine would be better
suited. From what I've seen of the Unix machines, the NeXT in
particular, is that the biggest slowdowns occur when paging
to/from disk. If there were constant paging the slowdown could be
enormous. That's why if it fits in memory, keep it there.
	As to also using a WP and a compiler, they take up very
minimal amounts of memory, especially compared to Mathematica (or
Maple in this case). Not particularly relevant.
	-- Ethan

"...Know-Nothing-Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog, an animal so stupid that it
had been sacked from one of Will's own commercials for being incapable
of knowing which dog food it was supposed to prefer, despite the fact
that the meat in all the other bowls had engine oil poured all over it."