[K12OSN] Client RAM question

[Eric Harrison]

On Sat, 27 Mar 2004, Les Mikesell wrote:

>On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 08:03, Rita Gibson wrote:
>
>> I am very interested in this discussion as I am trying to figure out how 
>> to get a little better performance in our lab. I have been trying to 
>> decide whether to try to migrate all the boxes I have that would hand 
>> 128MB into the lab -- performance is always an issue when you have a lab 
>> full of excited students trying to get their work done. If the client 
>> has more memory, then does the server do less swapping for that client 
>> (thus less processor time and bandwidth?).
>
>I think the only thing X can do with extra memory is use it
>for 'backing store' so the obscured parts of overlapping
>or covered windows (which can be a lot) are stored locally
>instead of being redrawn as they are uncovered. If you only
>work on one thing at once, this would not make much difference.

Fedora Core 2 will have a new utility, xrestop, which shows you the
X server resource usage. This is nice since the standard "top" does
not give you an accurate number, it includes video card memory that
X is using.

Right now I have a bunch of apps open (nautilus, mozilla, openoffice,
xmms, etc) and xrestop reports that the X server is using 25M of ram.
Almost all of it is pixmaps.

-Eric