Comments on: Windows - is - evil!

By: Christoffer

Christoffer — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Is that your office rig? Maybe it’s just I/O Interactive’s computers that [i]are[/i] evil? ;-)

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

There’s no ‘maybe’ about that!

(There’s also no / in IO :))

By: brian w

brian w — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know that during one of the previous rounds of PowerBook upgrades, Apple sold a 667mhz model? They just barely sidestepped evil that time!

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

That’s what I’m saying. You just don’t see this happening on the Mac!

By: Anders Rask

Anders Rask — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

What exactly are we looking at?

By: Sherlock

Sherlock — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Windows is evil and I appreciate your Photoshopaganda that you distribute to get the word out! Down with M$FT!

By: Kevin Francis

Kevin Francis — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

/me looks @ the relative linked image :D

Anders: the 667 MB swap file :D

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Whats bad about this? Yes, its a huge swap file but did you set it to be dynamically allocated? If you do let it dynamically allocate its terrible in its usage. Set it to a defined number (1.5-2x your RAM though on a 1Gb RAM system I’d say 768Mb of swap would be enough) and it’ll be more efficient in its usage.

Honestly though, unless your getting alot of swapping on the HD whats the problem? Doesn’t Mac/Linux just do the inverse and take all your RAM and allocate it?

By: Christoffer

Christoffer — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

When are they releasing motherboards with 666 MHZ FSB’s? :-)

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Oh wait…I get it now. Boy, do I feel sheepish :)

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Didn’t the Apple II used to sell for $666?

By: Kevin Francis

Kevin Francis — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Chris, the problem with using a swapfile without absolute need is that swap is on the order of several, many magnitudes slower than RAM. I run a fully loaded workstation/webserver/db-server/all-in-one, and I’ve been doing some development work and compiling a ton of software (which I write), here are my stats:

Type total used free
Mem: 375 268 107
Swap: 956 56 900

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Michael, can you confirm that it’s the pagefile that you are whining about?

My first guess was that Mac would NEVER, EVER have a near-zero percent load on the CPU, because it would be spending time animation the antialiasing pixels on the clocks second digits, in case you suddenly pressed the hotkey to scale them to full screen or something.

If so, what’s the problem? Windows uses the pagefile for all kinds of things.
I seem to remember it uses its pagefile (among other things) to cache programs that have been unloaded recently, and will be started faster if you decide to open them again, etc, etc.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Kevin, no doubt that swap is much slower than RAM. In fact, its not even in the same ball park. However, unless you have in the realm of a Gig or more of memory (in which case swap becomes pretty much useless) then the fact of the matter is exactly as I said. Your system will swap less and be quicker in the overall swapping if you set a predefined limit on its usage. Otherwise it will constantly increase and decrease the size of your swap. Which means constant usage of your hard drive and I/O stream.

Not good.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’m talkin’ about the number of the BEAST!

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

THE BEAST!!!