Wednesday, 11 July 2018

Computing resources optimisation [1B]

Since yesterday a few issues have cropped up so I am rethinking some stuff.

  • The Raspberry Pi has proved unable to cope with a particular feed I gave it, so reluctantly I am going to have to stop using it as a media player. It can cope with standalone playback but live playback in a browser can give it a lot of problems. I'm not sure what I will use it for at the moment.
  • The Antec will get reinstated in the Pi's place and I will look at giving it enough disk space to store all of the video and audio that I have played from mediapc up till now, so it will be equipped for both tasks.
  • mediapc may well end up as a day to day computer for email, word processing and the like. I'm not really sure. It may end up storing my photo collection that is currently on mainpc, to give mainpc more disk space. It may also end up being used as a third screen to display map resources on, such as aerial photos, that at the moment just end up using too much space on main pc.
  • serverpc will probably end up just storing VMs, map sources and what have you, stuff that doesn't need to be backed up. It will act as the backup server, but not itself be backed up for the most part.
Anyway those are the thoughts right now. The stuff I did yesterday moving screens around and so forth has been worthwhile. There are still a few cables to reconnect.

All those ideas, I don't know which are the most worthwhile ones and what will actually be implemented, it is just interesting to try them out. 

Trying to configure Gimp to use SSD swap was generally a waste of time unfortunately. Not only is it nearly impossible to get it to use a different swap path, it also gobbles a ton of disk space. I was working on one mosaic yesterday where it ended up using over 100 GB of disk swap space in addition to the memory space. In other words a separate SSD of 250 GB would be a better bet to ensure it has enough working space. One in either 2.5" HDD or M2 formfactor would be around $100 but is not a priority for now because that is a lot of money for me at present. So we just live with the slowness of disk based caching, you can always go and do something else for a while as Gimp does its thing, not really too big a deal.