>As far as I can tell Digital UNIX (formerly Digital OSF/1) is a fat
>bloated pig. At boot the kernel allocates over 8 megabytes of memory to
>itself on a 32 meg machine. Once I load up X and my assortment of
>desktop doodads the machine runs acceptably, as long as only one thing
>is running. If, however, I try to compile something and then do
>something else the machine swaps like mad, and simple window system
>operations like raising or moving windows have 5-10 second delays
>between pressing the buttons and seeing something happen.
[compared to 486 / 32 megs, linux]
Hm, you should not compare those two systems. It is not fair. 32 MB is
a fine amount of memory for a intel-based linux machine, but it is
extremely low memory for a RISC based system, running a microkernel
based OS.
Downgrade your linux box to - let's say - 8 megs of memory. Then boot
it up, fire up X and start a kernel build. I'am sure, it will start to
swap a lot, and the interactive performance will go down.
On the other side, you can upgrade your Alpha to 96 or 128 MB, and
I'am sure you will get a lot more happy with it.
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