FC3 sucks. It takes up too much memory!

John Wendel jwendel10 at comcast.net
Thu Jan 27 06:49:29 UTC 2005


Edward Yang wrote:

[snip]

>>
> Thanks for replying. Though it's quite off the topic to discuss what a 
> troll is, but I apparently see many people in Linux community likes 
> calling someone else *troll*.
> 

THIS IS NOT A TROLL

I have to agree with Edward Yang about memory usage, though I can't 
comment about Windows. I have been using Linux for 5 years and I'm 
really disturbed by the memory bloat in the current crop of desktop 
applications.

I've got one box that has 128 MB of memory. I normally use it for 
application testing and it has a minimal FC3 install, no Gnome, no KDE, 
and I almost always run without X. This morning I wanted to install 
"system-config-httpd" so I entered "yum whatprovides 
system-config-httpd\*" and walked away. When I came back in 15 minutes 
the box was having a major swap shit storm. Logging in on another VT 
took several minutes and running free showed all the memory used along 
with 200MB of swap and growing. At this point, I killed the yum process 
and the box recovered.

I then went and ran the yum command on my 512 MB box and watched free 
memory while it was running. It worked this time, but it did exhaust all 
the memory in the box and use a load of swap space.

I know that unused memory is wasted memory but really folks, test your 
apps on low memory machines! Swapping sucks. I won't even start to 
comment on the current crop of bloated pig mail readers, browsers and 
office suites.

Regards,

John




More information about the fedora-list mailing list