Reducing Fedora memory footprint?

[Pádraig Brady]

Pekka Savola wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to reduce the memory footprint of FC6.  Are there already
> webpages that describe how to make Fedora more manageable on those 3-4
> year old "junk hardware"?  (Some also have worried about the disk space
> footprint, but let's leave that out of scope for now..)

Some ideas here:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-May/thread.html#00498

> I think we have a problem if FC6 can't run properly on IBM ThinkPad X30
> w/ P3/1200 and 256 MB of memory.  I think the main bottlenecks are the
> amount of memory, relatively slow disks, and swapping on those
> relatively slow disks.

Some good optimizations will fall out of the OLPC work.
Also independently people are starting to look at bloat:
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news.html

> A couple of observations:
> 
>  1) with RHL73 (w/ fvwm2), the battery lasted for 3.5-4.5 hours.
>     With FC5 or FC6 (with xfce), it lasts for 1.5 hours, even if the
>     computer is "idle".  Either ACPI is a lot worse than APM, or
>     something is going on.  Any ideas how to debug this?

When was the last time you tried 7.3? I.E. are you sure
you haven't lost cell(s) in your battery in the meantime?

>  2) yum upgrade from FC5 to FC6 (about 1100 packages) took 8 hours
>     (just the depsolving, upgrade and cleanup -- all packages and
>     headers already existed on local disk). Only yum and Xorg were
>     running at that time.

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-October/thread.html#00797
Also anaconda need loads of memory any may be swapping with 256MB RAM?
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186067

>  3) are there more light-weight desktops/WMs than xfce?

http://xwinman.org/

>  Recently, it seems it also has become bloated, e.g.,:
> 
> psavola   2745  0.2  3.2  82388  7964 ?        S    Nov21   1:49
> /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins/xfce4-battery-plugin [...]

I don't know what that is the output of exactly, but be careful
with mem reporting tools on linux as they are confusing at best.
Have a look at http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py

Pádraig.