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If you set up your Linux distro from scratch you can easily manage under 200MB of RAM. I have an LFS I set up which idles at 150MB or so. A LOT of stuff is bloa
by hashhar 10y ago
If you set up your Linux distro from scratch you can easily manage under 200MB of RAM. I have an LFS I set up which idles at 150MB or so. A LOT of stuff is bloat in modern distributions.
I recommend everyone to try and build an LFS (Linux From Scratch) at least once or at least set up an ArchLinux box to get a feel for how Linux actually works and where the bloat is.
As an example, the music player daemon (MPD) has 110 dependencies among which is wayland or x-org, I don't know why.
Also, using udev to only load needed kernel modules helps with a lot of memory usage.
- ryandrake 10y agoCan you recommend any good tools for measuring and plotting overall system memory usage over time? I always thought it would be a fun project to try to strip down a Linux distribution and see how low I could get worst-case memory usage.
- hashhar 10y agoYou can simply pipe top's output to a file using something like cron. There is a very good tool for boot times though integrated into systemd. Call it using `systemd-analyze`. It has a lot of subcommands you can check by `systemd-analyze --help`. Also, if you'd like to compare performance degradation over time, NixOS is a good choice to run because it can simply rollback to old configurations and you can see what changed.
- hashhar 10y agoIf you could give me a brief list of what features you expect from such a tool I'll be happy to take it up as a project and release it.