Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
Yosef Meller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
I've recently made the move from Gentoo to Kubuntu. All went well,
no special problems; but when I restarted the system after the
install completed, I had a little bit of a shock: gkrellm shows 51%
of my 256MB RAM is used - without doing much!
Why does it bother you? What does "used" mean? Can you post the output
of free(1)?
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 247604 223564 24040 0 12204 70176
-/+ buffers/cache: 141184 106420
Swap: 249472 10180 239292
"used" as in not buffered or cached. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
This is about twice what my gentoo system utilized with roughly
the same processes running.
What do you mean by that? Can you diff the ps -ef output on two systems?
The gentoo system used to be where the new Kubuntu is now, so I can't
diff, but trust me, I've done the measurements and I know my system.
I've tried the usual stuff to reduce memory consumption: I went
through the list of services (not much to change, Kubuntu runs very
little by default),
This is not "the usual stuff to reduce memory consumption". Is there a
process (or two) that eat most of the memory?
This is what usually what gets recommended in forums and such. What do
you consider 'the usual stuff' (if there is such a thing?)
The largest process I could find is Xorg, which (according to pmap)
consumes about 150M, very little of it is libc and libdl.
I've reduced the number of gettys and replaced them with fgetty,
even though I knew the effect is negligible.
Why did you bother if you knew there would be no effect?
Just for curiosity, to see how much I can squeeze :-)
df showed two tmpfs systems, one of them containing kernel modules I
don't use - I umounted both with no (or little) effect on memory
consumption.
Why did you expect it to have any effect?
I didn't really expect anything, I wasn't sure how tmpfs works and I
experimented with it; I didn't find a good explanation of it on the web.
2. Ways to optimize memory consumption without compiling stuff?
Why do you think that recompilation will help with memory consumption?
Reduction in executable size, mostly achievable by removing unnecessary
features, but a bit by better-optimised output, and I thought maybe
someone could tell me something about stripping (default in Gentoo) and
other techniques. Also, empirical data: the previously mentioned Gentoo
system that was compiled from scratch (and I had two other comparable
Gentoo systems in thee past). You can question my data, as I can't get
it now, but I know what I know.
I'd really like to go back to the 'swap is for Windows users' days,
When was that exactly?
Two weeks ago, when I had Gentoo installed. Why do I deserve this tone,
did I offend you?
as I don't see any memory upgrade comming soon.
It does not sound like you have any memory problems at all. By your
own admission you are running happily, with X and stuff, using only
about 128M of RAM. You are far away from swap if you stay at this
level. And don't even bother trying to run XP in 128M...
The problem only starts when I run Matlab (and I expect to run some
heavy tasks with it in the near future). As I said earlier, the 50% or
so used memory is the baseline. I know it's not a big problem in general
use, but it bothered me nevertheless.
I know Windows is much worse, I wasn't trying to make that comparison,
I'm sorry that it sounded that way.
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