Reducing Fedora memory footprint?

[Pekka Savola]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> 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

Thanks.

>> 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?

About a year ago, a bit more.  Given that the laptop is ~4 years old 
now, such a dramatic drop IMHO cannot be explained by battery aging 
alone. However, the proc says:

# more /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present:                 yes
design capacity:         47520 mWh
last full capacity:      18260 mWh
...

The ratio of "last full" and "design" is similar to the 1.5h/4.0h 
lifetime I'm now seeing.  Unfortunately, I don't know what the numbers 
might have been with RHL73, and whether ACPI/APM has any effect here.

>>  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

Interesting -- but in my case, I wasn't running anaconda.  I did 'yum 
upgrade' from command line.

In case a rough breakdown of time spent in each step would be useful, 
depsolving took a while, but only in the order of dozens of minutes. 
Running transaction check took something around 30-60 minutes.  The 
first stage of running transaction for real (i.e., before any progress 
bards appeared) took a very long time, maybe 1-2 hours.  The upgrade 
itself took maybe 3 hours.  The cleanup took maybe 2-3 hours.

>>  3) are there more light-weight desktops/WMs than xfce?
>
> http://xwinman.org/

Unfortunately, that doesn't answer the question of 'more light-weight' 
as I fear that xfce is the most lightweight of the desktop bunch at 
least...

>>  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

That shows total memory usage of 197 MB (including firefox taking 
82MB), though top reports that 100+ MB of swap is being used:

Mem:    246632k total,   240024k used,     6608k free,     3096k buffers
Swap:   521632k total,   106408k used,   415224k free,    37504k cached

Not sure which is more accurate.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings