Memory usage - default X install can't use yum with 1GB RAM machine

[Paul Wouters]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, James Antill wrote:

>  You have 522MB of Swap, and 450MB is used. Add more swap. You may also
> find that you have a lot of dead memory due to updated files. prelink
> esp. is great for this.
>  I've attached a simple python script I've used, it's not perfect but it
> shows roughly how much dead memory you have and will kind of show where
> it is.

I'll have a look at it, thanks!

> > why it still needs so much memory. All it needs at that point (it was
> > installing the 1st rpm), is the list of 752 package filenames in an
> > install-order list. Why is that taking up 300MB?
>
>  300MB to upgrade 1GB of data is excessive?

Well, yeah. quite. But apart from that.

When yum reaches the point of actually installing things, after
all the memory intensive dependancy computations, the only thing it
should need to remember is the ordered list of rpm packages to install
(assuming yum can't just call rpm with the packages in order). It
should be able to free most of the memory it had to use to calculate
the ordered list of packages. I am talking in the order of a few kbytes,
not 300MB.

Paul