On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:39:46 -0400 ken <geb...@mousecar.com> wrote: > On 10/27/2013 09:10 AM Celejar wrote: > > On Sun, 27 Oct 2013 08:45:33 -0400 > > ken <geb...@mousecar.com> wrote: > > > >> At long last it's time for a new laptop. I'm planning to run a lot on > >> it: at least 3 VMs (Windows, Linux, and Mac) under virtualbox. plus > >> server stuff like apache, MySQL, a CMS or two (likely drupal and > > > > Stuff like apache, MySQL and WordPress will use virtually no resources > > when they aren't doing anything, so your question is really > > unanswerable without information as to what, exactly, those services > > will be doing? > > Understood. At the same time, there is no way for me to say what > exactly those services will be doing. The future is always kind of > murky. So we're forced to speak in somewhat vague generalities. > Perhaps I should have mentioned that, since it is a laptop, it's not > going to serve as a production webserver, but rather for testing. And > you're right that apache, MySQL, and wordpress themselves demand very > little from a system. My 1.5GHz CPU handles them all quite easily. > It's really some of the workstation apps that suck down the CPU > sometimes to a crawl.
Indeed. I run lighttpd / mysql / wordpress, as a sandbox to test complex posts before posting them to my production blog. I don't notice all that stuff running, in general. > >> wordpress) in addition to a lot of 'workstation' kinds of apps like > >> Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP (on large photos), music- and other > >> audio-players, video player (to view movies on DVD), etc., etc. on the > >> Linux VM. > >> > >> In other words, there'll be a whole lotta stuff running on this machine. > >> And I want it to be responsive... not just "pretty good" and > >> definitely not sluggish. > >> > >> On my current (nearly ancient 1500 MHz) laptop running Linux, I can do > >> everything "pretty good", except that when watching movies on it the > >> sound and video get out of sync and when I browse to some particularly > >> hoggish websites, the CPU load goes up to 4 or 5 or 6 or more. I don't > >> want that to happen on the Linux VM on the new laptop... or on the other > >> VMs either. > >> > >> So does anyone here run something like this? If so, what CPU and > >> graphics card does your system have and how much RAM does it have? Does > >> it run "pretty good"...? or slow...? or does everything come onscreen > >> the split-second the finger leaves the mouse button? Can you watch > > > > No idea what your current setup is like, but on my Core 2 Duo (2 > > GHz) system, running a relatively stripped down (although not a > > hard-core minimalist) setup it is certainly not the case that > > "everything come [s] onscreen the split-second the finger leaves the > > mouse button", and I doubt this is the case even with fairly beefy > > systems. > > At some point, after throwing enough hardware and decent code at an > executable, it's eventually going to run (how, it seems, *all* the ads > say) "Blazingly Fast". The question is, how much hardware is needed to > get to that point. Since my own system is by no means the fastest > around and I haven't used a faster one in quite awhile, I have no idea > how much hardware. That's what I'm here to find out. > > What I've often noticed on my current system is that, when, e.g., a > webpage is loading quite slowly (Facebook, for example), it's the CPU > which is the bottleneck, not the network, not swap, not the speed of the > hard drive. So this is obviously what needs improvement. Well, the > graphics card could bear some responsibility, but I don't know how to > measure its load/capacity. I understand what you want, and I really don't know. I run NoScript, Flashblock, Ghostery and Privoxy, which should help speed things up, but lots of webpages still take some CPU time. > >> movies and have the video and audio stay in sync? Does everything on > >> the web come up fast, or do some pages take awhile to render? > > > > I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there will always > > be "some pages that take awhile to render". > > I would say that too. Given the web is such a huge collection of > webpages, it's a pretty safe bet that someone's going to put something > out there which is bloated beyond what is practical for all but few to > read. We could say this even if we had a web client running on a > 1024-node beowulf cluster. Well, I rarely have pages that get seriously stuck (unless, of course, I need to run Flash :(); they sometimes need a few seconds of CPU time, but they generally straighten themselves out pretty quickly. Celejar -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-laptop-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131028195314.970997429866b291563a4...@gmail.com
