On 20 Feb 2019, at 18:56, James Linder wrote:
On 20 Feb 2019, at 8:00 pm, macports-users-requ...@lists.macports.org
wrote:
So my philosophical question is “Why MacPorts these days?”
Because running the tools it provides in a VM is a grotesque waste of
RAM and disk space and puts a wall up between tools I want to use
occasionally and the UI where I prefer to work mostly.
Bill I disagree! What is a waste? I typically give my VMs 2G from a
32G pool. I run 2 or 3 VMs without noticeing.
The one of my Macs which is most reliant on MacPorts has 2G, cannot
handle any more, and typically runs with <100M free and 1G in
/var/vm/swapfile* files. The fallback positions there are NetBSD or a
trash can, not a VM.
The two Macs that I regularly use as personal machines both could handle
a permanent 2G (or even 4G) VM at the cost of using the fancy tricks of
macOS memory management. However, I rely on using tools managed by
MacPorts often enough on those machines that I'd need a permanently
running VM holding on to a big gob of memory that macOS would otherwise
be using as fs cache or to avoid compressing other processes' memory or
purging purgeable pages. Nearly everything I manage with MacPorts on the
machines that could handle a big VM is something I use for a few seconds
(or milliseconds) at a time, perhaps a few dozen times per hour all day
long or a few times per day. So 99.9% of the time, that big VM's memory
would be used for nothing but keeping an idle VM in existence. That's a
waste as I see it.
And that doesn't even touch on the extra friction that would be added to
how I work.
You *can* get apple ram from not-apple that is quite cheap.
I've been topping up Macs with aftermarket RAM since the limits were
measured in MB...
My Macs typically manage to utilize all but a few hundred MB of their
RAM, so setting aside substantial amounts to mostly do nothing is
pointless, and since at this point the only one of my 6 machines not
maxed out would set me back $600 to take from 32G to 64G, the existence
of "cheap" RAM isn't really relevant. I use tools from MacPorts on the
best-performing and biggest machines that are available to me for
arbitrary use, and a VM carved out from those machines just to replace
MacPorts would be silly.
For me. My usage is atypical. If a 2GB Linux VM works for you as a
replacement for MacPorts, that's great.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Available For Hire: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole
