[Techtalk] more cores, more slows

[Anthony de Boer]

John Sturdy wrote:
> "top" will show you how much RAM and how much swap space is used / free.

Another significant one is "iotop", which shows which programs are
spending their time waiting on disk access, or are responsible for
filling up the disk queues.  Sometimes a system is more I/O-bound
than anything else.

There's also "htop", a variation on regular top.

> I've cleared out one source of bloat by using ratpoison for my window
> manager; no decorations and no special effects (neither of which did
> anything for me, anyway; I like my whole screen for what I'm working
> on).  More RAM for my giant Emacs, as it attempts to evolve into the
> Kwisatz Haderach ;-)

fvwm is still a good window manager too.

Not running flash saves me from a world of resource-hoggery, security
advisories, and being advertised to.  Video sites like Youtube seem to
have been the only folk using it for any good, but HTML5 may yet gain
enough traction to go that way.

But in general, knowing which applications are huge and which ones have
memory leaks and bloat up over time and need restarting once in awhile is
better than flying blind.  Have an idea of how much space firefox or
whatever normally uses, so you can spot it being bigger and needing to be
kicked.  And I'd certainly rather restart one application or other than
have to take everything down for a "modern" window manager.

-- 
Anthony de Boer