In article <tlhilde.713763363@roby.ecn.purdue.edu>, tlhilde@roby.ecn.purdue.edu (Troy Hildebrand) writes:
| Ok, I have a 386SX(16) with 2Meg of ram... about 1.2 Meg free after bootup.
| 
| I think i just did something rather foolish, and am wondering how long
| it will take to finish.  I have a 1.4 Meg tarfile, which I decided to
| compress.  Thing is, the tar file is larger than my memory, and it is
| taking a long time to finish.

  Memory should not be a problem, although your /is/ rather small.
Compress takes about 650k to run, max, at least on my other systems. You
probably have that much memory free, or at least are not paging your
brains out. The real problem is that (a) you don't have much memory for
disk buffers, either, and (b) the SX16 is a total pig.

  I'm running one with 12MB and X is really slow (I have the FPU) while
recompiling the kernel takes about 2 hours. Next week I'm getting a
386DX40 w/ cache, and that should help considerably. Maybe the best $179
I ever spent, actually.

  The funny thing is I built the box for Linux out of spare parts after
I upgraded the last system. Now I'll have a spare motherboard and case
again, and a disk controller, and a cheap VGA... I really don't /need/
a 4th system, so this time I may sell it off after I build it. Probably
with Linux installed...

-- 
bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; Box 8; Schenectady NY 12345
    I admit that when I was in school I wrote COBOL. But I didn't compile.