AIX on Model 80 with X windows question

[Ken Seefried iii]

In article <16887 at oolong.la.locus.com> richp at romulus.UUCP (Richard L. Pettit Jr.) writes:
>In article <14059 at rouge.usl.edu> pcb at gator.cacs.usl.edu (Peter C. Bahrs) writes:
>>I have a model 80 with 300mb hd, 8mb memory and a 20mhz processor.
>>I have just loaded the new release of IBM AIX 1.2.  
>>
>>X Windows is kind of slow.  When I run ico -r, it doesn't move across the
>>screen...it chunks across.  The mouse also freezes for small time
>>periods and then catches up.
>>
>>I am using a 10mb page space.
>>
>>Any ideas on fine tuning this machine?
>
>Buy a  math  co-processor.   

One more time kids...repeat after me...X is *not* floating point
intensive!  There is a *little* FP code in the arc drawing routines,
and some clients might use more or less FP, but in the general case a
387 doesn't buy you that much for X.

IMHO, the answer is:

1) More swap space.  On machines similar to yours at work (386/25s, 8MB
RAM, 330MB disks, SCO OpenDesktop) I use 16MB for general users, 24MB
for developers and especially heavy X users.  

2) More memory.  8MB is a minimum configuration for X.  I've found
(subjectively) in the past that 12MB is a pretty comfortable size for
me, doing Motif development and cranking up lots of clients.  16MB is,
of course a little nicer...:-) (for the cost of a 387/20, I think you
can buy almost 4MB of SIMMs, and that 4MB will go much farther).

N.B. - when you increase memory size, you also probably want to nudge
up swap size.  Swap == 2*(main memory size) seems to be the consensus
around here.

These are, of course, only my opinions...no warrenty expressed or
implied...

--

	ken seefried iii		ken at dali.gatech.edu

	"Vee haf veyz off making you talk...release da veasles..."