Reducing Fedora memory footprint?

[John Reiser]

>>> 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?

> Also, back in 7.3 time the kernel probably had HZ=100, and now it is
> usually 250 or 1000.  Slow laptops may not get back to sleep at all between
> ticks.

'hald' polls all CD and DVD drives to detect when a disk is inserted.
I see about 9 interrupts per second per drive.  For example on common
x86 clone boxes with CD as /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd (and no harddrives there):
   grep ide1 /proc/interrupts; sleep 10; grep ide1 /proc/interrupts
hald ought to have a settable parameter to control this.
Until then: try putting a disk into the drive(s), or kill hald-addon-storage.

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