Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

[Mike McCarty]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 23:57, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
> 
>>Loading OO took 24 seconds. So simply low RAM is not the complete
>>answer. Exiting OO and then restarting it took about 8 seconds,
>>which corresponds to what others have reported. So it looks like
>>perhaps a disc bandwidth problem. But I don't know what the cause
>>would be.
> 
> 
> Might just be the best an older drive can do.  I'd guess that

Eh? This system is just over one year old. Is that what you
mean by "older drive"?

> bumping the RAM to 512M or more and switching to one of the newer
> drives with 8MB cache would make that box 'feel' at least
> 4x faster.
> 
> 
>>At 20 MB/s and achieving, say 20% actual throughput,
>>22.3% of 256MB is 57MB, which would take at 4 MB/s 14 secs. Hmm,
>>actually not far off (<2x). I really did do that computation based on
>>my experience with the disc throughput achieved on other systems
>>I've used. Hmm. But flushing to virtual should only really double
>>the time, and 2x14 is not *very* close to 58.
> 
> 
> If you have to flush out real memory first, you have to factor
> in the seek time and the swap partiton may not be nearby what
> you are loading and it may thresh back and forth several times.
> If you are just re-using cache you aren't forced to do a
> write-back.

Yep. That's why I figured 2x with 20% actual throughput.

OTOH, with memory unloaded, it took 24 secs to load. After
exiting, it then took 8 sec to load. So it is the disc.

Mike
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