[ale] [ANNC] ALE CENTRAL for Thursday, May 21, 2009

[Jeff Lightner]

It's not so much how much resources each app uses but how much of the
SAME resources they use at the SAME time.  I've seen systems brought to
their knees by something like:

while true
do ls -lR /
done

Each invocation of the ls uses very little resource by itself but
cumulatively they are using the SAME resources at the SAME time.   

I've also seen multiple users running the same thing drag a system to
its knees.  I worked at an organization where we create a "Performance
and Scalability" environment that had been tested and tweaked over a
period of months.  After go live it began crawling despite all the
testing that had indicated it should scream.   I found no less than 30
users running "top" and another 20 running the horribly written script
for checking the Maestro (Tivoli nowadays) job scheduler.   Stopping all
of that and only having the people who were responsible run the tools
resolved that.  It was rather gratifying as it let me show something I'd
been complaining about for some time to the director.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of JK
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 1:32 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Subject: Re: [ale] [ANNC] ALE CENTRAL for Thursday, May 21, 2009

Jim Kinney wrote:
> emacs by default runs slower due to overall system usage. 3 developers
> on a single-core Xeon running emacs can bring a 2GHz machine to it's
> knees....

Maybe if they're also browsing with Firefox while editing. Seriously, on
the resource-bloat index, Emacs barely shows up when compared to many
much-more-popular apps.

On my development machine I've had both FF and XEmacs up for several
days. At the moment, FF is using 487MB of RAM and 18% of the CPU; XEmacs
13MB and 0%.  FF has 13 tabs open, XEmacs is editing 23 buffers and
running a custom time-tracking app I wrote in elisp. (Note that FF
is a critical development tool -- without regular infusions of XKCD
and Balloon Juice my productivity would plummet!)

Just injecting some actual data...


> <ducks and runs>


...but can't hide!

-- JK

-- 
A closed mouth gathers no feet.
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