Reducing Fedora memory footprint?

[Pekka Savola]

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..)

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.

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?

  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.

  3) are there more light-weight desktops/WMs than xfce?  Recently, it
     seems it also has become bloated, e.g.,:

psavola   2644  0.0  3.3  72840  8292 ?        Ss   Nov21   0:07 xfce-mcs-manager
psavola   2650  0.0  3.7  76792  9140 ?        S    Nov21   0:31 /usr/bin/xfce4-panel
psavola   2654  0.0  3.1  68484  7844 ?        S    Nov21   0:02 /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins/xfce4-menu-plugin [...]
psavola   2745  0.2  3.2  82388  7964 ?        S    Nov21   1:49 /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins/xfce4-battery-plugin [...]

    and:

    $ ldd /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins/xfce4-battery-plugin
         linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0x00117000)
         libxfce4panel.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxfce4panel.so.1 (0x005c4000)
         libxfcegui4.so.4 => /usr/lib/libxfcegui4.so.4 (0x003d4000)
         libxfce4util.so.4 => /usr/lib/libxfce4util.so.4 (0x00435000)
         libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x006fc000)
         libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x00118000)
         libatk-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0 (0x001a5000)
         libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (0x00368000)
         libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x0050f000)
         libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (0x001c1000)
         libpango-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0x00f1e000)
         libcairo.so.2 => /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2 (0x001ca000)
         libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0x00236000)
         libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0x00dbb000)
         libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00110000)
         libglib-2.0.so.0 => /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x00275000)
         libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00a94000)
         libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x00313000)
         libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x0031c000)
         libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x005da000)
         libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x00336000)
         libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x0037f000)
         libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x00eea000)
         libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x00d04000)
         libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x00e99000)
         libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x00d55000)
         libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0x0038f000)
         libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0x00da6000)
         /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x006e1000)
         libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (0x00bdd000)
         libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x00444000)
         libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x00399000)
         libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0x003ac000)
         librt.so.1 => /lib/librt.so.1 (0x00423000)
         libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x00d4e000)
         libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00df0000)
         libexpat.so.0 => /lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x004d3000)
         libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00c39000)

    Something is wrong when when a simple battery plugin takes 80 MB of
    memory..

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