Linux, what are our objectives?

[jack-rp9/bkPP+cDYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org (Jack Coats)]

I agree.  Check out the amount of storage you are using, swap and 
memory.  Try to have enough
real memory to not NEED to use swap, but make sure your swap is 'big 
enough'.  For me, I put
about 2x memory or so into swap.  Things do grind to a halt if there 
isn't enough memory and swap
combined.  Memory is cheap, but still make sure you have enough swap.

I have a machine that can only do 512M memory, and I still put in a 2G 
swap area, because it is
so 'limited'.  Even this 1GHz machine still runs nicely, most of the time.

Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:58:16AM -0500, Don Levey wrote:
>   
>> On the other hand, I *do* iconify, and I don't tend to keep open
>> anything that I don't need in the near future.  But then, I'm dealing
>> with a slower machine at the moment, and both my wife and I are running
>> simultaneous sessions and we switch back and forth (and will continue to
>> do so until we can afford to fix her laptop).  Performance is negatively
>> impacted if I keep a lot of things open.
>>     
>
> Lots of RAM will (mostly) fix that. And RAM is relatively cheap;
> if you can use DDR2-533, for example, 4GB can cost $40 or so.
>
> -dsr-
>
>