[Posted and mailed]
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kent West) writes:
> What's the real-world minimum hardware for running Netscape on top of X?
> I've got a 386-40 with 8MB that does okay for the command line stuff, but
> Netscape is horridly slow. I know the 386 is underpowered, but it's all
> I've got right now. I was just wondering if doubling my RAM would bring
> Netscape up to a useable speed, or if I'm just going to have to find a
> bigger machine (486-100, or Pentium, etc).
RAM is surely the bottleneck in your case. X11+netscape takes a lot
of ram. I used to have a 386 with 16MB of ram, and I think I could
get X11 and netscape (3.something) running without swapping but no
other programs could be run without starting to swap and I had
minimized daemons that I didn't need.
But back to your question. I would bet that they would run better on
a 386 with 16MB vs a 486 with 8MB. 24Mb would be even better. There
is a point somewhere between 16Mb and 32Mb where there is a drastic
change in performance due to not needing to swap for normal things. I
think this is somewhere near 24MB. Right now I have 36Mb out of 64Mb
free and am running X and a couple xterms along with a sleq of
daemons. That's 28MB in use, and it would be lower if I wasn't using
KDE (which uses tons of RAM).
Basically, it doesn't matter if you have a Pentium II 400MHz if your
computer spends all it's time swapping to your harddrive.
Erv
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Univ of Wisconsin-Madison [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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