Thin Puppy freaks out with streaming video and audio

You'd think with a 1 GHz processor and a super-fast Internet connection, the Thin Puppy would handle streaming video and audio reasonably well. Not so. It's jerky, and frequently the machine just slows down as Puppy Linux begins accessing the CF drive -- creating a swap file, I presume.

So is it the motherboard's video and audio hardware ... or is it the 128 MB of system memory? I'm betting on the latter. Anything that keeps the system from creating swap space is bound to speed things up considerably, because creating swap files and writing to them is slow, all the slower when your storage medium is flash memory -- which in Puppy isn't supposed to be written to at all during the computing session.

All I know is that when I downloaded a 50 MB ISO image and tried to actually ... work with it .. . the available memory went down by .... 50 MB -- and that's out of 73 MB available after the OS is loaded into RAM. That's one of the weak points of this box -- the FSB (front side bus) runs at 133 MHz ... that's why I can use slow PC-133 memory (and am trying to get by with PC-100) ... but it's gotta hit the performance. ...

So the moral of this story is -- front side bus speed matters (that's why it's listed in all the Fry's ads), fast memory matters, and having a lot of memory also matters. If I can find a 512 MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I bet things get better, even for streaming audio and video.

But at 128 MB, the Thin Puppy is doing very, very well for tasks that don't involve those two resource-intensive tasks.

And this leads me to the entry that will, at some point, be on top of this ...