ninth level down

A while back I noticed that my MythTV box seemed a little sluggish, especially when I’d not used it for a while – the menus were unresponsive and recordings seemed to take a while to play. This pointed towards mythfrontend being swapped to disk and having to be loaded back into memory. As I only had 512MB of RAM I sourced another stick to bring it up to 1GB. I’d always intended to do this as my box uses dual channel memory, so two sticks should be faster than one anyway.

The difference was immediately apparent and it’s like a different system. Not only is it always very responsive, but everything just seems to happen that little more quickly.

I guess the problem really stems from the fact that I run a full Gnome desktop, which eats up most of the memory before I even start. Still, I’ve tried everything from Xfce to EvilWM to ratpoison and I just feel that they lack the polish and usability that makes Ubuntu what it is. So, I’ll stick with Gnome and say that it was £20 well spent.