Reducing Fedora memory footprint?

[Gilboa Davara]

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 15:23 +0200, Pekka Savola wrote:
> 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?

I'd guess you're hitting the disk and draining the battery.

> 
>   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.

yum is a python application and as such, will always be slower and more
memory intensive then c/cpp based applications (such as apt) -
especially when it comes to CPU/memory intensive tasks such as
dep-solving.

> 
>   3) are there more light-weight desktops/WMs than xfce?  Recently, it
>      seems it also has become bloated, e.g.,:
[snip]
>     Something is wrong when when a simple battery plugin takes 80 MB of
>     memory..

XFCE 4.4 is a real memory hog - almost as much as KDE/GNOME do.
I'm using IceWM on my PII366/256MB laptop and it works like a champ.
I'll submit the RPM to extra when I'll have some free time.

- Gilboa