Achieve Pidsley Level (Rape my RAM)

[GekkoP]

I managed to use echo piped on i3 bar, but I got 52MB instead of the 50 I had using conky. Though it was good for my poor bash scripting skills.


Edit: after a couple of reboots, I got 48MB. Without cups, 47. I'm slowly finding my way to linuxhalla.

[machinebacon]

Noticed any change in performance? :D

Next step: replace rxvt with some light terminal emu ;)

[GekkoP]

Lighter than urxvt? Just when I thought I had a real good alternative to that terminator!

[ivanovnegro]

^ Haha. And now it even gets ridiculous with that amount of RAM you have. :D I use more RAM on boot and have half the memory.

[machinebacon]

@geko: oh yesh there are - aterm, eterm, st - to name three. Of course, as ivan says, it's a bit ridiculous to shave off a few kilobytes here and there. You would even notice a performance increase (lol) by changing the gtk2 theme to something based on Mist engine. Hand-spun kernel, clean up systemd. Exclude drivers/modules that are not needed on your box (ask Pidsley). Play around with swappiness (ask seabizcuit). Heck, even the use of a wallpaper (ask Wux) or the default fonts (ask ivan) have *some* impact...
But if you ask me, this is more like adding a pinch of star aniseed to a skewer of shashlik. You might notice it, hate it, love it, or ignore it :D

[DebianJoe]

Why has there been no mention of replacing the bash with ash, and going 100% busybox init instead of systemd? I mean, if we're min/maxing, then that should certainly be mentioned.

...seriously, though, at some point (unless you're Pidsley, or you're just playing the reductionist game for the experience) it doesn't really make a considerable difference in performance. I've come to embrace my 50ish MB on boot system, because the benefits of zsh and good dynamic tiling are worth far more to me than shaving another 20 megs of RAM off of the 6GB I have available that NEVER gets used.

My system is bloat, and I'm okay with that. ;)

[rhowaldt]

people just made a valid points.

you know what's a fun thing to do? weed through your dmesg and find all the slow points and small, (probably) meaningless errors, then Google your ass off trying to fix them. i guarantee you will shave off at least 2Kb, and notice a definite increase in boot-speed of (at least!!) 0.33 milliseconds. plus: it's fun! (i know cuz i did this)

[pidsley]

Why has there been no mention of replacing the bash with ash, and going 100% busybox init instead of systemd? I mean, if we're min/maxing, then that should certainly be mentioned.

I did this on my test box. I thought people already knew about it.

It is true that at some point you start to sacrifice usability for numbers. Everyone has a critical point where the tradeoff becomes important. I'm sitting here looking at my conky running on my main machine, using 400M of 4G on a 3.8.2 kernel, and that's perfectly fine.

I do reductionist systems to show people what's possible -- I run Arch with OpenRC and eudev instead of systemd for the same reason (and to give the finger to anyone who tries to tell me they are being forced to use systemd). It's not a game; I'm trying to make a point.

[GekkoP]

Oh yes, I'm happy with 48/50MB at the moment. I got my bloat, but everything I need is working exactly the way I want. So yeah, it's just a game now. But I keep learing from it.

[DebianJoe]

I did this on my test box. I thought people already knew about it....It's not a game; I'm trying to make a point.

I knew about it, and had used that exact method when I did my 64MB RAM thin-client project because of the results that you had shown. I don't think that Gekkop was around when you did it, though.

[ivanovnegro]

...or the default fonts (ask ivan) have *some* impact...

Sure. E.g., disable anialiasing or use bitmap fonts.

[gutterslob]

Uhm Gekko, you do realize I was just joking about lowering memory use, right?
You don't really have to go through all that just for the sake of it.

[dkeg]

Its more about the process of identifying unnecessary processes. Great opportunity to learn about your system. Bloat for me is more about the stuff I don't need/use.

One of us should move this stuff to a new thread on its own. I can do it later if I'm on my laptop

[GekkoP]

Uhm Gekko, you do realize I was just joking about lowering memory use, right?
You don't really have to go through all that just for the sake of it.

Well, like I said (and like dkeg's saying above), I'm learning something new. Of course I can't see better perfomances, but it's a good exercise if I'll happen to deal with older PCs.

[ivanovnegro]

@Dkeg: It is heavyily mixed with other posts and screenshots. I would suggest from now on we move the discussion to another thread if Gekko still wants to achieve Pidsley level. ;)

[machinebacon]

Okay, these posts have been moved/split from the Screenshots into a new topic. Sorry for inconsistency ;)

[ivanovnegro]

^ Ah, splitting, great! Worked.

[GekkoP]

Well, my own "work on that RAM usage, noob!" topic. Thanks!
Maybe I should try another wm and see if it'll make any difference.

[machinebacon]

dont worry too much about the wm resource usage. its more about which wm does what you want. but sure, grab yourself gangbang and read the xbindkeys file, and test them all. and check their free -h after start.

[pidsley]

If you're down around 50M at startX right now that's pretty good. You won't get much lower by changing the WM. Post your pstree and we can see if you have anything unnecessary running (understanding that this is an exercise and learning opportunity more than anything).