Finally the silence is broken, a new episode is here! Thom was not available again this week, OSnews reader Mike Ferland takes his place and we discuss Windows 7 and The Perfect OS (no relation).
Here’s how the audio file breaks down:
| 0:00:30 | Intro |
|---|---|
| 0:01:10 | “Windows 7†|
| 0:32:00 | “The Perfect OS†|
| 1:04:34 | Meta |
| 1:06:45 | (Total Time) |
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The intro / intermission and outro music is a Commodore 64 remix “Turrican 2 – The Final Fight†by Daree Rock.
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I still don’t understand why you’d need 2GB of memory just to run an operating system and ‘every day’-applications. This is not just an OEM-problem.
EDIT: Maybe I should clarify, on my Ubuntu 64-bit machine I have 4GB of RAM, but when I open a terminal and type free it says, it uses 1GB. About 500MB for kernel and userspace and about 500MB for filesystem-cache, of which part is probably memory-mapped-files which were put their by readahead. Just like Vista does.
So where does it all go ?
Edited 2009-11-10 10:00 UTC
Not that ‘1GB minimum’ is impressive. 😉
I would also like to know where it all goes. I mean i think there is no doubt that windows 7 utilises the ram much more efficiently and is far far more responsive than vista. But why it needs that much in the first place??
Hi,
I’ve got the opposite problem. I’ve got 12 GiB of RAM, and when I type “free” (after running for 8 days) it says that 9.5 GiB of that RAM isn’t being used for disk caches or anything else that could improve performance; and is therefore wasted.
After running for long enough a very good OS should say “almost no RAM free” to let you know that the OS is doing everything it can.
-Brendan
I don’t know of any OS that would use 12GB of ram just by running. You don’t think this is a bit over kill? I mean maybe in a server with a lot of clients.
I have a server running ldap, samba, nfs, postfix & squid perfectly with 2GB of ram. Only got 70 clients though.
Hi,
With 12 GiB of RAM I expect about 10 GiB of that RAM to be used for disk cache, so that most of the time the OS never needs to read data from disk more than once (which leaves most of the disk drive bandwidth free for writes).
What do I get instead? About 750 MiB used for disk cache, lots of free RAM doing nothing, and very little of the advantage that I should get.
Basically, I should only have 9.5 GiB free if the OS hasn’t had enough disk activity since boot to fill the RAM yet; or if one or more processes were using lots of RAM and were terminated (and the OS hasn’t had enough disk activity to fill the RAM that the terminated process/es freed). Neither of these cases apply for my machine (over 8 days uptime with plenty of data transferred to/from disk, and no processes capable of using that much RAM have been terminated).
For a 32-bit kernel it’d make sense (not enough virtual memory space for large caches); but as far as I can tell 64-bit Linux is broken – by now I’d expect about the RAM to be “almost full” (e.g. between 50 MiB and 500 MiB free due to any recently terminated processes only).
– Brendan
Well you won’t find me arguing there. Alothough i am not sure or aware of the ram problem, there are general problems with 64 bit Linux (which i am not convinced that is just linux as i think other platforms have problems with 64 bit).
I just stick to the 32 bit myself.
I have a server with 4GB of RAM that does just that.
It’s a small web- and database-server. It never reads from disk, just writes to disk.
It’s a Debian Linux-server btw.
1GB is more than enough, until you run bloated apps. I like some bloated apps. Most people use bloated apps, whether they like them or not
. My every day applications include OOo/KOffice, Firefox, the devil that is Flash, etc..
It actually works impressively well on my P3 1.13, 384MB RAM, Thinkpad.
Minimum requirements ain’t what they used to be.
The problem with Vista was that it was very hard to get it scaling down in base resources. 7 is far more balanced, in that regard.
Edited 2009-11-11 04:54 UTC
Sorry I couldn’t be on this episode, everyone! I was in a hospital bed at the time…
-Tess
I hope you are ok ?
EDIT: I mean: nothing to serious I hope.
Edited 2009-11-10 17:04 UTC
Tess,
I am sorry to hear that! I hope you are well again and back on the OSnews podcasts as soon as possible.
As an old mainframe programmer (Natural/ADABASS and CICS/Cobol) I find you give a really good balance to the two guys who seem to have no IT experience other than PCs 🙂
Regards,
Peter
At 37:30 ish, well I laughed!
Who was the second guy in the podcast? He didn’t come across as terribly bright haha.
“well, umm.. I mean.. uhhh”