[email protected] writes:
> I have an oldish laptop with only 128M RAM. It's been running Debian
> unstable for a LONG time. But it's been getting slower and slower.
>
> The reason for this is the gradually increasing size of the various apps I
> run --- basically, X, xterm, bash, vi, LaTeX, and opera or mozilla. On my
> other machines I use Emacs or Xemacs extensively; I've never done that on
> this one. I use WindowMaker as window manager, it takes only 7M or so
> nowadays. Even that's a bit more than I'd like.
Something like XMonad, or one of the other "no mouse" window managers, might
be a bit lighter, although I wouldn't actually put much money on it.
> X now takes 219M of virtual memory (most of which swaps in and out,
> constantly).
What is the physical footprint, though? That "virtual" size can have anything
up to two full mappings of the framebuffer memory on your card, as well as a
bunch of other shared data with applications...
> opera is OK on straight HTML pages, but for something like facebook it grows
> and grows -- mozilla does the same -- and eventually OOMs.
*nod* Opera sits pretty steady-state at around 256MB for me, although I do
have a sizable memory cache in there. I am not surprised it, and Mozilla, are
a bit heavy.
> Does anyone have suggestions for a low-memory setup?
w3m(1) is fairly tolerable, and can do nasty things to display images, either
through the Emacs interface or through running inside xterm, which might work.
You might find that xmonad or something similar works to reduce the already
tiny overhead of WindowMaker.
Using the same toolkit (eg: Xlib, Qt, GTK) exclusively rather than multiple
concurrently will marginally reduce memory use because more pages can be
shared, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it to be notable.
[... old hardware and efficiency ...]
> I suspect there's a lot of bloat in there somewhere.
Well, if you ditch X and go back to character cell applications you can get
rid of an awful lot of the "bloat", like multiple fonts, different text sizes
and other framebuffer artifacts. ;)
More seriously, other than the web browser many of the common targets for
blame are actually still pretty light-weight in general. Things have grown is
size, but they have also grown significantly in capabilities.
You might find 'exmap' useful in tracking down the actual memory use on the
machine, assuming you can get the kernel module built. Since it can see the
page tables it can actually report the *real* cost of various applications.
Regards,
Daniel
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