From: Juan-Carlos Lerman (jclerman_at_netzero.net)
Date: Mon Aug 02 1999 - 02:33:12 EDT
Shattering results, caution: broken window-glass (pun
very much intended):
Continuation of this morning discussion on performance of
Win95 OSR2.0, on a TP770-1AU (with 64MB cacheable RAM):
The online load was too variable and the resource meter
useless for my purpose, so I changed strategy.
I standardized running all that I had earlier listed
on my systray, plus the following apps with displays on
the desktop: Wintop and 4 browser windows: 1 IExplorer,
2 Netscape Navigator, 1 Lynx.
The benchmarks were done on the results of programs
running in the background (Prime95 and SETI_at_HOME),
without GUI display during the run.
SETI_at_HOME runs 10% slower at 128 MB than at 64 MB RAM.
Prime95 (not so easy to measure), at least 5% slower for
same RAM range.
GUI performance, or "shattering glass" conclusion: dragging
windows with the tackpoint, reshaping, resizing, invoquing
new instances of a browser, etc, in summary loading any
GUI interface went from sluggish to snappy by increasing
RAM from 64 to 128 MB. (How could I had ever have used 32 MB
as I did during 1 year?)
So, if one doesn't need an interface with images, stay
within the cacheable limit, otherwise, exchange lower
computational performance for higher GUI performance.
How to choose how much total RAM? It seems that it
depends on how many concurrent GUI interfaces are
running and how large and frequent are the memory
leaks. I found useful a little program that tells me
how much physical RAM is free (the System Monitor in
the Accessories programs of Win95 can also be set to
show this value), and unload apps or reboot as to keep
some MB of free RAM always available.
I haven't been able to write the swapfile to a ramdrive.
If somebody knows how, let me know, please.
JC, not playing solitaire like others...
==
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