4 Jun 2011

Results of two unscientific observations

It's a Saturday and I am kinda bored.  So I thought I'd explain my tweet a few days ago.
  • I was kicked to find out that the Atom chip my puny laptop has is a 64-bit processor.  I wiped out the 32-bit Ubuntu I was running and installed 64-bit version of it.  I don't know the internals of Linux, but it looked like the 64-bit kernel was swapping too much.  My machine has 2GB RAM.  Even when half of the physical RAM is free, the machine would be using around 0.5 to 1 GB of swap space.  It was unusably slow, I reverted to 32-bit Kubuntu.  It doesn't swap stupidly any more.  (On the other hand, 64-bit kernel runs fine on my machines that have 8 or 12GB RAM.  Maybe 64-bit works well on machines that have a lot of RAM.)
  • I was cribbing about bad wireless performance of my Galaxy Tab, and someone suggested that I use the n channel of 802.11 on my home wireless router.  I made the switch and the experience just got worse.  Maybe it was the router's 802.11n implementation that sucked.  After reverting to 802.11g, it's better now.

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