Hi everyone,
I've been using "Friendly FossaPup64" on a system for a couple months. I thought I had it in pretty reasonable working shape when I gave it to my wife to use as a replacement for a very old desktop that is now struggling to run Windows 10. Shortly before turning it over to her, I did a clean install and set up a Swap file of equal size as the RAM (4 GB). She complained from the start that it would often "hang," especially during Zoom meetings or web-browsing in Firefox. I noticed that when it would "hang", the red bars on the "gatotray v3.3" performance meter had gone to the top. After a minute or two, the red bars usually would subside, and everything would behave normally. Sometimes, though, it would hang and just not respond for a very long time, and sometimes it would shut itself off after a long time.
After a lot of spousal complaining, I took the system back and noticed that every few minutes it would do this, lasting a minute or two each time, then it would be back to normal. I remembered the Swap file, and wondered if it mattered. So I deleted the Swap file and rebooted, and have been using the thing for an hour or two, with many (19) tabs open in Firefox, trying to see if it would hang again. So far, removing the Swap file entirely seems to have fixed the problem.
(I jinxed myself - As I was writing this, I opened another couple tabs, including one for WeatherUnderground, which seems to be a particularly "heavy" web site full of ads and animation. The gatotray meter pegged, turned to solid red, then the entire system hung, with not even the system clock updating for over 15 minutes, at which point I powered it off and restarted the system.)
So, I seem to have found my system's limit. Around Firefox 20 tabs is too much, especially if some of the sites are heavy content. I can live with that; I was trying to break things just now.
Does this make sense? The recommendations regarding the swap file in the Getting Started and System Requirements forum doesn't really address what size swap file, if any at all, I should use for a system with 4 GB RAM.
Thoughts?
Here is more info about my system:
Puppy Version: friendly-fossa64-rc3 (based on fossapup64 9.5)
System specs:
RAM - 4 GB
Processor - Intel Pentium CPU N3510 @ 1.99 GHz
Product name: HP Pavilion 11 x2 Notebook PC
Installation: Frugal, on sda2
Thanks very much!