[MPlayer-users] Help! XFree86 4.1.0 crashing when...

[Dariusz Pietrzak]

>  I hear once in a while stories like yours. Stories about boys that don't
> need much RAM/Swap. Let me show you my PC:
Sheer existance slows down memory access quite considerably ( check out
Hydra OS for something efficient )

> [steve at Paradise img]$ free -m
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:           502        498          3          0          1        151
> -/+ buffers/cache:        346        155
> Swap:          252         36        215

And takin` OS designs aside, think.
You've got ~40 megs swapped to disc, this process takes some time (
suppose you could achive speeds of 1M/sek - which I doubt, those
swapped-out pages are not that big, and moving them out was probably
interleaved with other disc accesses... your HD head had to go here and
there... ( adding to noise pollution, which is not something you should
forgot about, not to mention added heat dissipation ))
..anyhow - you probably lost quite few seconds from responsiveness of your
system.. which you wouldn't if you used those 151M from cache.
 So.. you system is lost responsivenes and is more noisy - you'll get
irritated more often and die from heart attack in young age.
And that is not all - due to addedd useless strain on your HD it'll die
sooner.
And that is not all - due to added heat, your whole system will die
sooner.

Happy hacking,

-- 
Dariusz Pietrzak
Hokahoka gohan...