J Arcane wrote at 09/22/2014 02:54 AM:
I had not actually heard of Xvfb before now, but that could be a good solution. I balk at using full X11 with only 512MB of RAM, but that could be enough to satisfy the original code's expectations. I will have to experiment with it.
Side comment: I wouldn't worry too much about the memory requirements of an X11 server daemon (we used to run X11 and everything else on 16MB engineering workstations fine, and universities would sometimes run X on 4MB workstations with megapixel displays, even without local swap.)
The X11 daemon on my computer right here is using only 3MB virtual memory total, and I have some server-intensive apps like Firefox running against it, on two heads.
(It's mostly only the modern ``desktop environments'' that tend to be bloatware (e.g. even a decade ago with those, the little clock panel applet was reporting as 50MB RSS), but a plain X11 server daemon itself can be pretty small. A lot of the early development of the desktop environments you're using now was by smart-but-inexperienced 20yos who were tossed into the deep end, under 20yo managers who were trying to start a company. With some noteworthy exceptions. Since then, the desktop environments seem to have been evolved by often more-experienced people, and improved, but the desktop environments weren't built with the great architectures and practices from the start, which tends to be a technical and cultural burden for a very long time. And developers have usually been targeting contemporary PC desktop hardware, when several gigabytes of RAM can be assumed, except for occasional forays into devices that are battery-powered and/or are intended to be ultra-cheap to manufacture.)
Neil V. ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
