memory upgrade
Par Benoît Dejean le jeudi, 19 avril 2007, 23:11 - GNOME - Lien permanent
Since I upgraded my ibook from 512MiB to 1.25GiB, i live in a new world. I should have upgraded earlier to put an end to my nightmare.
User memory usage is now 450MiB so the kernel/disk/buffer cache is big and makes my system faster than ever 
Back when i had only 512MiB, i used to have 300MiB of swap usage :
- the switch between evolution mailer and calendar used to take 15s. It's now 3s !
- starting a new terminal now only takes 1s where it lasted up to 10s !
- the gnome-menu is totally new to me : it's fast ! it instantly popups where it used to trash my disk for 3s before opening.
- etc, etc
You can't really understand memory issues if you don't run a computer with <= 512MiB. So boot your computer with mem=256M and enjoy
Commentaires
Hmm, I don't know what is wrong with your system, but you might want to reboot more often or something or check your mem usage in general for strayed processes... 512 MBs is enough for normal usage with Linux (and Windows, and OSX). That includes firefox, evolution, terminals, rhythmbox open at the same time, and occasionally some light OOo open at the same time too.
Up to last year I even ran Arch Linux at a 128 MBs laptop without major problems (1-2 apps open at the same time, optimized services), so I would imagine something heavier, like fedora/suse/ubuntu will do fine on a 512 MB machine. I have two laptops running ubuntu with 512 MBs each and they are fine...
You aren't serious, are you?
What the hell does eat so many memory? 1.25 GB is sure better than 512, but with 512 it shouldn't take 15 seconds to switch evolution functions...unless evolution is a memory pg, which it is
But it's easier to switch from evolution than adding more ram.
"starting a new terminal now only takes 1s where it lasted up to 10s !"
There is something wrong with your computer ! It takes one second max to do this with my 512MB.
You're not alone with that kind of gnomish performance. There is one less reason to use gnome since it has grown too slow.
I personally am switching to the desktop which uses the object oriented language, it really can't be much slower than this. At least the features are not crippled down to someones grandma's level.
Not sure what you are doing with your computer but even if I agree that running gnome with 256Mo of RAM is a little to low, 512 is largely enough for epiphany (~tabs), tracker, evolution, deskbar-applet, terms.
FYI, I'm running this on a PIII 500 with only 128Mo of swap (yes that means my box would die with your numbers :p).
This is about my laptop. I reboot it only for kernel upgrades. Having 300-400MiB of swap means constant disk trashing. There's nothing wrong with my computer : application just take to much memory. Many of my friends experience the same issues.
Come on, my iceweasel with no plugin, started a week ago and only a couple of tabs takes 114,3MiB privated_dirty. Evolution is 35MiB. Xorg 55MiB. liferea 30MiB. gnome-terminal 20MiB. Nautilus 7MiB. etc You just can't run this with 256MiB of RAM.
I hope that the GMAE project will lead us to a reduced memory usage. Am I dreaming ?
gnome-terminal 20MiB ? 2.2MiB with ten tabs
evo is just 6.3MiB
Tou've got an old GNOME version ? 2.14 ?
Bob > ahahahhaah. I don't know how you get your stats, but they are plain wrong...
Depends if you count shared or not…
I am talking about private_dirty + X server memory which is displayed in "Memory" column of system-monitor
Me too ! Currently evolution -> Memory : 5.6MB
You may then want to open a bug against system-monitor.
"I personally am switching to the desktop which uses the object oriented language"
There's a Smalltalk desktop?
you might be living in a cave dude, look around you maybe?