Re: Tuning for very little RAM
In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 292, Issue 8, Message: 13 On Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:52:59 + Bruce Cran wrote: > On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:03:45 +1000 > Da Rock wrote: > > > Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. > > > > I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is > > absolutely hammering the swap. > > > > I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so > > I need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. [Rock, mate, you may be on a hiding to nothing trying to run X apps in 100MB (128MB fitted I guess?) while setting yourself up as the advocate of an OS they're going to think is s slow .. but that's just me :-] With a lightweight wm it may be better, but you're talking about some big apps. OTOH, 256MB is plenty for that sort of usage; any chance of adding more RAM to it? Even another 32MB will really help .. > > Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help > > this situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and > > has a new install of FreeBSD 8.0. I just manage with 160MB on a old Celeron 300 laptop whose prime mission is pppoe, firewall, nat and routing for the LAN, half a dozen obscure websites, DNS, mail and such .. plus until now, KDE 3.5 on Xorg 6.9 on 5.5-STABLE. Just! That with 30-40% swap (of 384MB) in use, but mostly static, eg 6 more Konsoles I'm not using just now, 5x minimised kwrites for sources I may edit a few times a week, stuff like that stashed away in swap, using very little resident memory, ie not as bad as it looks :) > You can save a bit of memory by building a custom kernel. First, remove > any options you don't need such as INET6, NFS, AUDIT etc. Then, you can > replace "device ata" with more specific drivers, and "device mii" with > specific PHY drivers for your NIC. On a 128MB box I have that's running > 8-STABLE my kernel is just 4.1MB. Indeed. That's no bigger than my trimmed 5.5 kernel, good to hear. > You should also be able to build Xorg so it'll use less memory - for > example by not requiring hald but getting it to read the > configuration from xorg.conf instead. Again talking on the margins of usability, I notice that the Xorg with 7.0-RELEASE (X server 1.4.0) only used similar memory to 6.9 (30-50M, say 20M resident), but on 8.0-RELEASE (X server 1.6.1) top shows SIZE 126M RES 115M .. on a 256MB laptop, eek! It's a HAL-free config, though installed from packages so not at all optimised. Will try that later, while I'm hunting for 1G RAM at a decent price for it (Thinkpad T23) > You can also tell FreeBSD to agressively swap idle processes out by > setting vm.swap_idle_enabled to 1. Thanks for this, Bruce; I hadn't come across it before, or missed it. This has had an amazing and so far apparently only beneficial effect on the 5.5 box. At 127d uptime, I crossed my fingers and set that, to see swap drop from its then steady 46% (~15 mozilla tabs open, past time to restart the leaky thing anyway :) to below 40% in a matter of minutes. A little extra (async) swap in/out activity for sure, but contrary to expectations it's noticeably more responsive to things like switching desktops/windows on a slow machine already under swap stress, and even somehow(?) has increased idle CPU in top by about 3% to over 90%! cheers, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 09:21:06AM -0800, Charlie Kester wrote: > On Wed 06 Jan 2010 at 04:25:31 PST Bill Moran wrote: > >In response to Da Rock : > > > >>Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. > >> > >>I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is > >>absolutely hammering the swap. > >> > >>I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so I > >>need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. > >> > >>Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help this > >>situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and has a new > >>install of FreeBSD 8.0. > > > >The most obvious thing to do is reduce the number of running programs. > >Go through /etc/ttys, for example, and disable all but one or two consoles, > >and edit /etc/rc.conf to disable anything that you don't need on the > >system (possible sendmail, syslog?, etc) > > The other most obvious thing to do is to look at the apps you're running > and see if there are more lightweight alternatives. > > If I had to run a machine like that, I'd probably want to avoid X > Windows altogther and go console-only. But it sounds like your > "skeptics" won't let you do that. > > Assuming you have to use X, you'll want to avoid heavyweight desktop > environments like KDE or Gnome. I like tiled window managers like musca > or dwm myself, but your skeptics will probably want a more traditional > window manager (aka MS-Windows clone) like xfce or openbox. Or even lighter weight, CTWM, which is just a step up from twm > > When you say "internet (with plugins)" I think you mean Firefox. If > this isn't a hard and fast requirement, take a look at some of the more > lightweight browsers like Midori, Kazehakase or Arora. (I'd recommend > even more lightweight alternatives like surf or elinks, but I don't > think your skeptics will approve.) > > Same for OpenOffice. There are alternatives to each of the apps in the > OpenOffice suite that might not have all the same bells and whistles, > but will run in much less RAM. AbiWord is a great word-processor if that would serve Da Rock's needs. For very kwik browsing I use links -G [[the graphical incarnation of the otherwise text]] links. Every bell and whistle is 'just a tad more'; but then so many tads add up to tons; so it takes some forethought before piling on the apps. Da Rock, did you mis-type that you only have 16k free? > > For some ideas on which apps to try, look at the apps bundled in some of > the Linux distros that target small machines. > http://bengross.com/smallunix.html has a good list of these distros. Good one! gary > ___ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org" -- Gary Kline kl...@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Wed 06 Jan 2010 at 11:02:49 PST Kaya Saman wrote: [...] I don't think we want to hijack this thread or this forum and turn it into a debate over which window managers and apps are best. As I pointed out in my followup to my original reply, there's already a voluminous discussion on those topics. I think we should simply point interested readers in that direction and let them make up their own minds. [...] I am currently using a PIV 2.4GHz with 480MB RAM with fluxbox! Well, I'm currently using a P3 866MHz with 512MB RAM with musca! And it works very well too. ;-) Anyway, like I said, let's not get too carried away with this line of thought. This thread is about tuning for very little RAM. Choosing lightweight apps is only one of the things needed to tackle that problem. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 21:02 +0200, Kaya Saman wrote: > [...] > > > > I don't think we want to hijack this thread or this forum and turn it > > into a debate over which window managers and apps are best. As I > > pointed out in my followup to my original reply, there's already a > > voluminous discussion on those topics. I think we should simply point > > interested readers in that direction and let them make up their own > > minds. > > > [...] > > I am currently using a PIV 2.4GHz with 480MB RAM with fluxbox! > > This works really well, I have firefox and opera browsers installed and > will look at getting my favorite Seamonkey installed too sometime but > isn't a priority as this machine doubles as a DNS, NTP, NFS, and Radio > streaming server :-) > > And I only have a 35GB HD too which is peanuts considering that in my > full-blown network in my other house I have round 3.2TB... > > So far am only using 80-90MB RAM when X is turned off! With X on it's > round ~125MB that's with running Xterm, Firefox, and Rhythmbox or even > Mplayer. > > In my opinion it's always best to test and try out a few WM's to see > which one fits the bill best, after that it's easy! I'm running icewm - desktop icons are not a priority atm, but I will use idesk later. I think sysctl options will help, as well as reducing my consoles. I'll keep everyone posted and see what happens. Thanks for the pointers guys. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
[...] I don't think we want to hijack this thread or this forum and turn it into a debate over which window managers and apps are best. As I pointed out in my followup to my original reply, there's already a voluminous discussion on those topics. I think we should simply point interested readers in that direction and let them make up their own minds. [...] I am currently using a PIV 2.4GHz with 480MB RAM with fluxbox! This works really well, I have firefox and opera browsers installed and will look at getting my favorite Seamonkey installed too sometime but isn't a priority as this machine doubles as a DNS, NTP, NFS, and Radio streaming server :-) And I only have a 35GB HD too which is peanuts considering that in my full-blown network in my other house I have round 3.2TB... So far am only using 80-90MB RAM when X is turned off! With X on it's round ~125MB that's with running Xterm, Firefox, and Rhythmbox or even Mplayer. In my opinion it's always best to test and try out a few WM's to see which one fits the bill best, after that it's easy! Regards, Kaya ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Wed 06 Jan 2010 at 09:52:32 PST Warren Block wrote: On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, Charlie Kester wrote: Assuming you have to use X, you'll want to avoid heavyweight desktop environments like KDE or Gnome. I like tiled window managers like musca or dwm myself, but your skeptics will probably want a more traditional window manager (aka MS-Windows clone) like xfce or openbox. Hey, xfce is not like Windows, it's fast. LOL If you want really light and Windows-like, icewm. Although last time I tried it, desktop icons--the lifeblood of the typical Windows user--required external programs (idesk) and were a hassle. I don't think we want to hijack this thread or this forum and turn it into a debate over which window managers and apps are best. As I pointed out in my followup to my original reply, there's already a voluminous discussion on those topics. I think we should simply point interested readers in that direction and let them make up their own minds. When you say "internet (with plugins)" I think you mean Firefox. If this isn't a hard and fast requirement, take a look at some of the more lightweight browsers like Midori, Kazehakase or Arora. (I'd recommend even more lightweight alternatives like surf or elinks, but I don't think your skeptics will approve.) AdblockPlus and FlashBlock are near requirements for browsing, particularly for slow machines. Maybe they'll work with non-Firefox gecko browsers. Good point. Something anyone considering these Firefox alternatives should investigate. Same for OpenOffice. There are alternatives to each of the apps in the OpenOffice suite that might not have all the same bells and whistles, but will run in much less RAM. gnumeric is nice for a spreadsheet. May not be particularly lightweight, but lighter than OO. Same with Abiword for a word processor. But again, we probably shouldn't get too deep into the discussion of various apps. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, Charlie Kester wrote: Assuming you have to use X, you'll want to avoid heavyweight desktop environments like KDE or Gnome. I like tiled window managers like musca or dwm myself, but your skeptics will probably want a more traditional window manager (aka MS-Windows clone) like xfce or openbox. Hey, xfce is not like Windows, it's fast. If you want really light and Windows-like, icewm. Although last time I tried it, desktop icons--the lifeblood of the typical Windows user--required external programs (idesk) and were a hassle. When you say "internet (with plugins)" I think you mean Firefox. If this isn't a hard and fast requirement, take a look at some of the more lightweight browsers like Midori, Kazehakase or Arora. (I'd recommend even more lightweight alternatives like surf or elinks, but I don't think your skeptics will approve.) AdblockPlus and FlashBlock are near requirements for browsing, particularly for slow machines. Maybe they'll work with non-Firefox gecko browsers. Same for OpenOffice. There are alternatives to each of the apps in the OpenOffice suite that might not have all the same bells and whistles, but will run in much less RAM. gnumeric is nice for a spreadsheet. May not be particularly lightweight, but lighter than OO. -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Wed 06 Jan 2010 at 09:21:06 PST Charlie Kester wrote: For some ideas on which apps to try, look at the apps bundled in some of the Linux distros that target small machines. http://bengross.com/smallunix.html has a good list of these distros. Hmm, I probably should have checked that reference more thoroughly before using it here. It's not as helpful for these purposes as I thought. Instead, I recommend googling for "lightweight linux apps". It's a frequently-discussed topic, and the people involved seem to love making lists. Most of the apps mentioned are in the FreeBSD portstree, so don't be put off by the fact that the discussion is usually confined to Linux. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Wed 06 Jan 2010 at 04:25:31 PST Bill Moran wrote: In response to Da Rock : Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is absolutely hammering the swap. I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so I need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help this situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and has a new install of FreeBSD 8.0. The most obvious thing to do is reduce the number of running programs. Go through /etc/ttys, for example, and disable all but one or two consoles, and edit /etc/rc.conf to disable anything that you don't need on the system (possible sendmail, syslog?, etc) The other most obvious thing to do is to look at the apps you're running and see if there are more lightweight alternatives. If I had to run a machine like that, I'd probably want to avoid X Windows altogther and go console-only. But it sounds like your "skeptics" won't let you do that. Assuming you have to use X, you'll want to avoid heavyweight desktop environments like KDE or Gnome. I like tiled window managers like musca or dwm myself, but your skeptics will probably want a more traditional window manager (aka MS-Windows clone) like xfce or openbox. When you say "internet (with plugins)" I think you mean Firefox. If this isn't a hard and fast requirement, take a look at some of the more lightweight browsers like Midori, Kazehakase or Arora. (I'd recommend even more lightweight alternatives like surf or elinks, but I don't think your skeptics will approve.) Same for OpenOffice. There are alternatives to each of the apps in the OpenOffice suite that might not have all the same bells and whistles, but will run in much less RAM. For some ideas on which apps to try, look at the apps bundled in some of the Linux distros that target small machines. http://bengross.com/smallunix.html has a good list of these distros. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:03:45 +1000 Da Rock wrote: > Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. > > I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is > absolutely hammering the swap. > > I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so > I need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. > > Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help > this situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and > has a new install of FreeBSD 8.0. You can save a bit of memory by building a custom kernel. First, remove any options you don't need such as INET6, NFS, AUDIT etc. Then, you can replace "device ata" with more specific drivers, and "device mii" with specific PHY drivers for your NIC. On a 128MB box I have that's running 8-STABLE my kernel is just 4.1MB. You should also be able to build Xorg so it'll use less memory - for example by not requiring hald but getting it to read the configuration from xorg.conf instead. You can also tell FreeBSD to agressively swap idle processes out by setting vm.swap_idle_enabled to 1. -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
In response to Da Rock : > Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. > > I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is > absolutely hammering the swap. > > I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so I > need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. > > Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help this > situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and has a new > install of FreeBSD 8.0. The most obvious thing to do is reduce the number of running programs. Go through /etc/ttys, for example, and disable all but one or two consoles, and edit /etc/rc.conf to disable anything that you don't need on the system (possible sendmail, syslog?, etc) -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Tuning for very little RAM
On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 08:03:45PM +1000, Da Rock wrote: > Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. > > I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is > absolutely hammering the swap. > > I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so I > need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. > > Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help this > situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and has a new > install of FreeBSD 8.0. > > Cheers > It's late here so I'm pretty much doing this ad hoc, but I think you should renice the least important apps. Your mail MUA/MTA can be set to very low prio, for instance. If this is an ongoing demo, bring up and leave up OOo and have it set a it higher than your email. wine: don't know. Your broswer should be set very high. gary PS: About three years back I ran a 1998 HP deskyop with less than 512M with full KDE. It was slow is some things, but perfectly adaquate so long as I didn't try everything at once! > ___ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org" -- Gary Kline kl...@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org The 7.79a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Tuning for very little RAM
Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is absolutely hammering the swap. I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so I need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help this situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and has a new install of FreeBSD 8.0. Cheers ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
