Say your netbook has a mere 1 GHz CPU. That means 1 billion cycles per second. So that's 1 CPU cycle per millionth of second. 24 milliseconds is 24,000,000 billionths of second. So that's 24,000,000 cycles.
So even a brand spankin' new SSD with barely any disk activity on it makes my CPU wait for millions and millions of cycles.
It only gets worse.
See, what happens is that since you need to hold more memory than you have room for, this means you have to pick what gets to stay on RAM and what doesn't.
There are a few ways to do that, but naturally none is perfect. When you decide that you accidentally got rid of some memory you did need, you have a "hard page fault" and you have to wait for millions of cycles.
Usually operating systems will privilege the processes that are on the foreground.
If multiple processes however are competing for your RAM, what might happen is that essentially each will step on the other's toes.
So more and more memory gets swapped and more and more hard page faults happen and more and more disk requests queue up and more and more time is required to service them
so essentially there comes a point where it doesn't matter how much swap your computer has, because it's already completely unusuable way before you've filled it up
If you've ever tried to alt-tab between programs and it takes an eternity and the UI seems to draw bit by bit painfully slow -- this is what is happening.
The computer is literally scrambling to gather the bits of memory from the hard drive swap that tells it how to draw the window.
Windows had thrown all of that away because the program was in the background and it figured it wasn't anything too urgent to hold on to.
So in 99% of computers, the hard drive is the bottleneck. How much RAM you have dictates how much you need to swap and makes the bottleneck that much tight
...but it's still not about how much RAM you have, but how expensive it is to deal with needing more RAM than what you have.
TL;DR version: Let Windows handle your memory/pagefile settings. The people at MS have spent a lot more hours thinking about these issues than most of us sysadmins.
Many people seem to assume that Windows pushes data into the pagefile on demand. EG: something wants a lot of memory, and there is ...
@murgatroid99 oh lol. IBM's version of Eclipse, two copies of Websphere, a couple Chrome tabs, usually Sublime Text, fish in cygwin, a couple oddballs. Also occasionally the virus scanner kicks up and I can't do jack shit to stop it.
4 GB of RAM. Windows 7.
Eclipse and Websphere alone take up more than 2 GB.
@badp Yeah, that's my point. If you're running all of that memory intensive stuff, obviously swap is your bottleneck. But that doesn't make it a general rule
@badp The only point I'm trying to make is that when you say that "swapping is almost always the bottleneck", it's misleading, if not flat out wrong, because it depends on how you're using your computer
@Chippies actually nowadays my load is probably lighter than an average user's. When I finally get home I've only got energy for Chrome and maybe a videogame.
@murgatroid99 I rest convinced that in the most general usage patterns, that's where your bottleneck is. Yes, there are more specialized use cases where you might be bottlenecked by the CPU. Another example is bitcoin mining.
I said "common cases result in this being the bottleneck." Your retort is "yours isn't the common case." I say: "and yet this is still the bottleneck."
You say "the common case has swapping as the bottleneck." Your evidence is "my setup has swapping as the bottleneck." I say that your case is substantially different from the common case, which implies that that evidence does not apply to that assertion
@badp I've said this before. "You have the right too be wrong on the internet" is probably the most obnoxious and condescending dismissal of a person I've ever seen
@LessPop_MoreFizz Actually, TBQH, I should be cheering for the team that will give me the better chance of winning the office pool. Not quite sure who that is right now though.
@murgatroid99 Yes, I'm dismissing this argument with roughly the same amount of condescension I'm seeing coming from you. I was hoping you'd realize this is a pattern with you and the arguments you get into.
This is why I am quite strongly refusing to continue.
while Idk if swapping plays a huge role in this, but loading programs from an HDD takes much longer than from SSD, therefore storage drive is the bottleneck
considering average user closes their browser every time they're done looking at things online, that is indeed their main bottleneck
@LessPop_MoreFizz I think the Rangers will give me a better chance at winning the pool. Which is good, because I think I'd have a hard time cheering for Washington.
@badp I definitely didn't intend that, and I'm sorry if I came off that way. But I honestly don't see it. I was just trying to have a conversation about a statement I disagreed with.
