On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 10:17:59PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> wrote: > > > On ARM, it's 90MB, I guess MIPS should be similar. > > The man page says 65MB even in -9, but I guess they didn't count in the > > code, libc, buffers and the likes. > > > My OpenMoko FreeRunner phone is an ARM device that has 128Mb RAM and > runs pure Debian armel. Only time I need to kill things to during an > upgrade is when I'm upgrading the locales package or lintian, creating > locales files seems to take a lot of memory and the process gets > killed sometimes.
Decompression and generation of locale files never go together, so this shouldn't be a problem. As others have noticed, reducing the compression level can reduce memory requirement to a single digit, and that dpkg-dev already uses -6 rather than -9 by default. I believe it might be a good idea to go back to -9 on big architectures, but this is a detail that can be changed later. For now, it's important to know if it's save to enable xz everywhere, and it appears it is. If indeed xz -6 takes only 9MB to decompress, even Jarek's machine with 64MB should handle it without a swappeathon. I didn't check this myself, but I'm told that when xz has to swap (and not merely evict other processes away), its memory usage pattern is so bad that a file normally processed in ten seconds can take an hour. Thus, using 9MB vs 90 makes quite a difference. -- 1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor: // Never attribute to stupidity what can be // adequately explained by malice. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110212170423.ga9...@angband.pl