On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 11:35:25AM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On May 17, 2009, at 11:09 AM, Laura Conrad wrote:
> > This machine is too old to spend money on.  But I was hoping that
> > installing a video card with some memory would help with the redraw
> > being slow.  So I'd rather not fix the problem by taking out the card,
> > if there's another option.
> 
> If the computer is thrashing swap then the only fix is more RAM.

Not necessarily.  For example, Firefox is well known to have a host of
memory leaks which, if you leave it running long enough, will very
likely cause your machine to thrash eventually, no matter how much RAM
you have (unless maybe you use ulimits to limit the size of a process
to something appropriately less than the size of your physical RAM,
where the definition of "appropriate" is left as an exercise for the
reader... using this technique may or may not be practical for any
given case).  

Web pages which make heavy use of Javascript tend to tweak those
memory leaks...  We have a web application at work that, if I leave it
up in Firefox, will often result in my machine thrashing within a day
or two, even though I have 4GB of RAM.  The fix is not more RAM, in
that case; it's to restart the process.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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