------- Original Message ------- On Wednesday, December 14th, 2022 at 5:01 PM, Keith Lofstrom <kei...@kl-ic.com> wrote:
> I'm moving from a Redhat-family distro (Scientific Linux, > a physics-heavy CENTOS clone) to Debian-family distros. > I've played with Ubuntu 20.10 and and 22.10 on two > desktops; "snap" seems to use nontrivial amounts of RAM. > My preferred laptops are only 3GB; RAM bloat is an issue. > > I also maintain an offsite virtual server; my favorite > hosting company supports CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian. > > Is snap actually a memory hog, or is that my misperception? > Will snap remain mostly Canonical's walled garden? > > Moving to uncluttered Debian LTS (with its vast collection > of packages) seems to be a better option in the long term - > unless Debian "snap"s as well. > > Keith > > > > > -- > Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Ubuntu has always had memory problems, even before snaps. In 2012 Free Geek moved away from vanilla ubuntu as a direct result of apps crashing in low memory configurations. On a system with 2GB of memory things worked fine, but removing a single stick (simulating RAM failure, used/refurbished hardware) would cause some basic GUI apps to crash. That was 2012, we reliably demonstrated Ubuntu's inability to handle low-spec machines. I performed the testing myself and AFAIK they never went back to Ubuntu. As for snaps, someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think there may be a small RAM penalty. The whole idea is that a given app (and all of it's associated assets and dependencies) can be bundled together in a single squashfs package. Compared with a traditional linux systems using shared libraries, you are going to use more RAM. - the squashfs modules have to be decompressed in real time. This is similar to what the CD/USB installer does but on a per-app scale. - apps may not necessarily rely on the global libraries for things like GTK/QT or openssl. This means that if multiple apps are shipping with their own copy of a library that already exists globally, then memory will need to be allocated for each instance of said library. Exactly how much RAM is wasted here is determined by the 1337 skillz of both the snapd devs and snap package builders. As with anything, the more stuff you have loaded, the more memory it's going to use... -Ben
