The Penguinistas like to brag about how GNU/Linux runs just fine on low-rent hardware, by contrast with competitors like Vista that need the latest gleaming iron to be useful. And they have a point; but only up to a point. I can testify from personal experience that an elderly 333-MHz Dell with a recent Debian totally sucks wind when you run WordPress. And the real point is, it ain’t operating systems that bog your computer down, it’s apps.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Ciaran (Jul 10 2008, at 15:31)
Tried it with one of the caching plugins?
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From: mike (Jul 10 2008, at 17:14)
> it’s apps
Namely, it's Firefox. Just try any other browser and you'll see...
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From: Michael C. Harris (Jul 10 2008, at 17:20)
There are alternatives to Wordpress that might run faster for you. One example worth mentioning is Habari :)
I'm just kidding, I do realise what you're doing is probably more about code you're writing/testing than the blogging software, since I can't see you abandoning the ongoing code for WordPress.
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From: Against slowness (Jul 11 2008, at 03:31)
Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001105.html
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From: IllegalCharacter (Jul 11 2008, at 07:31)
Not to mention that you've got all these little apps running in Python/Ruby that suck up your resources in no-time flat.
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From: Joseph Scott (Jul 11 2008, at 11:49)
With a system that is 10 years old, it seems likely to not have much in the way of RAM. There's no mention of what exactly was running on that system, MySQL and Apache each eat up their share of resources.
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From: Lennon (Jul 11 2008, at 12:06)
Older machines were usually pretty RAM starved by modern standards. I had a dual-500Mhz-PIII workstation which I used for most of 1999 as my primary development system, and I think it had all of 128 MB of RAM.
Under NT 4.0 or RedHat 7.2, that wasn't so bad. Now, though, I don't think you can even run 'apt-get install [whatever]' on a modern Debian or Ubuntu in 128 MB without swapping. Add MySQL, Apache, and PHP, and you probably need 256 MB just to keep from swapping *before* anyone hits the frontpage of your WP install.
So while apps are the biggest consumers of memory, the OS itself isn't without some blame in the matter.
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From: Tim (but not THE Tim) (Jul 11 2008, at 19:02)
Bad apps, and/or bad application platforms like poorly-implemented VMs or interpreters, are often the case; one shouldn't discount I/O either. In my world (mainframes), the rule of thumb is to look at I/O first, when dealing with elapsed time issues.
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From: Tony Fisk (Jul 12 2008, at 06:36)
(...have you tried running Vista on the same hardware? ;-)
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From: Tim (but not THE Tim) (Jul 14 2008, at 20:32)
Thinking about this raised a question in my mind: are there efforts to create compilers for languages like PHP or Python?
Seems to me that once a script is debugged and working well, a compiled version might help speed-wise.
I'm not advocating moving to a code-compile-link-test cycle like C or COBOL but a code-test-code-test-decide-it's-done-compile-link cycle
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