On Sat, 2003-12-13 at 10:47, Kevin Sonney wrote: > Jon Carnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > My guess is that the Win98 was hitting the disk quite often (for reasons > > unknown) and that ate up the power. The apps I was running on Linux > > Windows has this bad habit of hitting the disk for swap even when it > really doesn't need to. it also does regular pings into the > configuration, and I think the CLOCK even updates something on disk. > > Windows in general is HD abuse, I think. > > > basically read the hard drive on start up and then ran fairly well right > > out of RAM. > > Linux does sane swapping - even in low memory situations, where Windows > will swap to disk even if it's running just the desktop and has a Gig of > ram free, it swaps.
Hi Kevin,
Yeah, Linux is very efficient/intelligent about using RAM as a buffer.
But, to be fair, isn't there also an issue (or perhaps was there an
issue?) with the ext3 FS causing HD activity every 5 seconds? For
instance, if you run:
vmstat 1
wouldn't you see IO activity (even if its just a few blocks) on pretty
regular 5sec intervals if you had an ext3 FS mounted?
I remember someone showing me the above issue a year ago and pointing to
it as a reason why ext3 was not exactly an optimal choice for battery-
powered systems since it somehow prevented the HD from spinning down
during periods of inactivity. Perhaps this issue has been fixed or
mitigated since I no longer see the same activity with recent Red Hat 9
kernels (am now running 2.4.20-24.9 on my laptop).
Can anyone cast more light on this topic? Please?
thanks!
Ed
--
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office: MIT Dept. of EAPS; Room 54-1424; 77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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