Just for the records,

I'm running my main OpenBSD on a P3-M 700MHz with 256M.

With XFCE it works fine, and, as I understand from my linux experience, to
run comfortably with KDE4 you today need something abobe 512M. As it was
said, in OpenBSD memory evacuation works so pretty good that, in order to
use such a machine profitably, it's just matter of using less appz at the
same time or a right mix of GUI and CLI ones.

There is just one doubt that I have about the need of more memory for
machines which are not heavy servers or multimedia developing ones:
BROWSING. Just open a whatever firefox and keep on opening tabs, my 256M
will at best start swapping after 7-9 concurrent tabs. With the heavy
technologies (java, php, etc.) today embedded in web pages and with the
growth rate of such trends (i.e. people like those developing chromium os
who would like to put the entire world into a browser), I expect the web
browser be the very next desktop memory hog for the years to come.

Here's why, today, bigmem is not essential for me but, I think, will maybe
be in 2-3 years from now.
Bye
Paolo



On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 3:07 AM, roberth <robert@openbsd.pap.st> wrote:

quoted text
> On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:19:23 -0700
> Clint Pachl <pachl@ecentryx.com> wrote:
>
> > roberth wrote:
> > > omg, i am using 95% of my memory all the time, should i be worried?
> > > maybe kern.bufcachepercent=95 has something to do with it; blame
> > > Bob.
> >
> > Holy shit! Mine's at 10%. Maybe I should crank mine up to to 95% and
> > then buy more RAM.
> >
>
> 90% was what was asked for in testing the feature.
> but since evacuating ram when needed works so nicely, i thought why not
> crank it up some more.
> guess even 99% with 2GB ram won't be noticable. ram is so much faster
> than the disk you have to get the data from. and no, no swap use
> whatsoever.
> someday bufcachepercent will be bumped by default. can't see a reason
> not to.
>
> no need to by more ram, to raise the cache.
> only got two gig in my thinkpad.
> after booting and starting the usual susspects(xfce,claws,ff,some
> terminals), i am still way below 1gig in use. (that's before caching
> realy kicks in. nice to have it for cvsync-ing the updated cvs-tree and
> then 'cvs up'-ing from ram...)