Old 486 computer & external CD reader advice needed

[Mike McCarty]

Rickey Moore wrote:
>>I wonder what could be done to speed Linux/X up?
> 
> 
> Mike, I've been on this rant for a LONG time! :) Runlevel 4 just sits
> there. Why not have X and X only running, with no server or network
> features at all. Zip, Nada, nothing in the way of deamons. Compose
> office stuff or code, play video games, Dvd movies, anything local
> requiring more speed. When you need the network, or to run server

Well...

I don't compose Office Stuff. I do code, but usually want more than
one window open for editing and compiling. I don't play video games
on my computer, nor watch movies. The only other thing I really do
is research the web, or read e-mail, both of which require network
connections.

> stuff, runlevel 5 time. Would that provide any significant gain in X
> responsivness? Anyone care to guess? I dnloaded an app called
> alsakiller or something to that effect, ALSA eats up about 3% of the
> CPU share, I think I'd kill that off and just run OSS in runlevel 4,
> for the games and video. whatchothink, Ric

I suspect that most of the slowness for *my* computer has nothing to
do with that so much as that Linux eats memory like there is no
tomorrow. So loading *anything* requires retiring a bunch of cache or
swapping virtual memory. My CPU is hardly ever loaded more than 20%,
and usually much less than 10%. When it is slow, I hear the disc
going nuts.

top - 23:59:30 up 1 day, 10:56,  5 users,  load average: 0.10, 0.35, 0.44
Tasks:  82 total,   2 running,  80 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  8.3% us,  1.7% sy,  0.0% ni, 89.7% id,  0.0% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    248088k total,   241792k used,     6296k free,    15128k buffers
Swap:   524120k total,   185244k used,   338876k free,    50680k cached
 

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  4150 root      15   0  186m  23m 5560 S  4.0  9.6 163:23.20 X
  4578 jmccarty  15   0 30452 8776 4252 S  3.0  3.5   0:38.74 gnome-terminal
  6269 jmccarty  15   0  169m  62m  13m S  2.0 25.9  47:51.04 mozilla-bin
  4500 jmccarty  16   0 19240 3180 2568 S  0.3  1.3   2:41.40 clock-applet
17040 jmccarty  16   0  3008  900  728 R  0.3  0.4   0:00.04 top
     1 root      16   0  2064  276  252 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.95 init

Mike
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