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Reduce Your Ubuntu Linux Memory Footprint
An anonymous reader writes "The ideas in this article will help you breathe life (and some additional security) into your old Linux machines and make better use of Linux on aging hardware. In this article, learn how to accurately measure the amount of memory your Linux system uses. You also get practical advice on reducing your memory requirements using an Ubuntu system as an example. A lack of physical memory can severely hamper Linux performance. This will help you reduce your systems memory footprint and keep your old Linux system running the latest fully featured Linux applications smoothly."
Is the author a 12 year old on work placement or is that article marked 'intermediate level' for some other reason?
Running smaller apps with less functionality MAY reduce your memory usage!
This article would be great if it had non-obvious content. Outside of the advice of "use things that don't use as much memory", the only thing the article provides is "find a way to make your favorite apps use less memory", and then some ambiguous and non-definitive help on 2.6's swappiness setting. As a "real" example of varying memory consumption, Lynx is compared against Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror. Great! Why not look at mutt vs. Thunderbird and KMail? irssi vs. XChat? And then why not just say "hey -- why not just use everything on the console/in ncurses?" Not that this is too surprising, the article is entirely about memory consumption, and only mentions lost features as a passing thought. (Disclaimer: I'm not ragging on any of the apps above, so don't start the flames.)
Not that the advice is bad, especially the section on looking for useless services and kernel bloat, but the rehash of it for the umpteenth time is just... *sigh* The section on swap is a bit misleading, as well. It is right, as it is written, but it fails to mention that swap is a good thing; if you're swapping out your running applications all the time, yes, something is wrong (your workload for the hardware, most likely), but otherwise you want to see swap being used. It makes room for stuff you're actually using. There are some clever VM behaviors out there (one example putting pages in swap *in case* they will need to be swapped out later [thus saving you the trouble]), but I don't remember which are in the default kernel.
Here's some real advice for running Linux (or anything) on old hardware: be rational. Ignore what machines you have and decide what you want. Then when you've done that, figure out what you want on your desktop, and what you just want. Offload anything that you don't need to have right in front of you. Want apache to serve a couple dinky files to friends? Okay, great, put THAT on your old P2. MythTV backend sucking up some cycles on the desktop? Move it to a VIA EPIA box and let it hog there and leave your desktop for desktoppy things. Being "lean" isn't worth it if it means you're ditching functionality you want. Don't try to struggle against old hardware if you want an awesome desktop and Beryl and the whole shebang. Sometimes you just have to let go of that 133 MHz Pentium you loved a decade ago.
rm -rf / (as root)
Not only this definitely optimizes your disc space usage, but also memory allocation within few seconds of operation.
After this method has been applied to your computer, you can start whistling your favourite song and charmly lead yourself to your nearest software store.
(This advice has been kindly brought to you by M$)
I think the article a parody onto itself.
By being unnecessarily obvious, and bloated mostly with a lot of useless information, it is trying to hog the reader's memory, the way processes might hog the system's. Thus, once the reader learns how to filter out the irrelevant and obvious stuff from the article, he can proceed to do the same to their Linux installation, reducing the memory requirement.
Bloody genius, I say. Brilliant!