[kde-solaris] ... people are running KDE3 on systems with as little as 64MB for daily use.

Stefan Teleman steleman at nyc.rr.com
Wed Jan 28 02:42:19 CET 2004


The problems you are having are not related to RAM. They are directly 
caused by the size of your swap partition, which is too small. If you 
increase swap to at least 3 times core RAM, you will no longer have 
these problems. I personally know of at least one person happily 
running the same 3.1.4 binaries on an Ultra 5 with 256MB RAM, and 
with a correctly sized swap (which in this particular case, is more 
than 3 times RAM).

Comparing identical software's memory footprint between 2 different 
OS's running on different hardware architectures built with different 
compilers is not relevant. Binaries at identical software release 
numbers, from identical source code, will have different sizes on 
different operating systems with different compilers.

I cannot confirm any of these miniature KDE sizes running on Linux, 
and i have been running KDE on Linux (RedHat) since KDE 2.2. 
Currently, i am running 3.1.4, with the binary build downloaded from 
KDE, on RedHat 9, on a 1.2GHz P4 with 512MB ThinkPad. It is 
configured with 1.5GB swap. With only KMail, 4 xterms and one Konsole 
running, i see a memory footprint of 420MB in use, and 170MB swap in 
use, as reported by KSysguard (the swap could very well be some other 
system stuff running in the background).

These sizes are consistent with what i see on the Solaris build (it's 
actually less on Solaris, for the same exact apps), and with what i 
have seen with KDE 3.0.* on Linux.

I also do not remember KDE 2.2 using less than 350MB RAM on Linux.

Even with this resource footprint, this laptop performs very well its 
additional duties of NFS and NIS server for my 2 Sun boxes at home, 
and i am exporting an external USB drive with two 40GB partitions. 
And i can also build additional KDE software from source, with gcc, 
on this laptop, while it's doing its job.

--Stefan

----

On Tuesday 27 January 2004 12:16, michael.szengel at philips.com wrote:
>
> Since I am the guy who caused this discussion I would like to share
> my personal (over 10 years) experience with memory usage of Sun
> systems and finally ask for a reason.
> I never experienced memory shortages on our Sun systems running
> only a desktop since the days of SPARCstation 1 with 16 MB RAM and
> about 45 MB swap (not counting the cases when sombody was trying to
> start a whole chip simulation on his desktop mashine ;-).
> For 4 years, my colleagues work on Ultra10 / Sun BLade 100 with 512
> MB RAM and 1 GB swap ... and never problems with memory.  Some of
> them open up to 10 desktops with dozens of terminals, xemacs and
> other stuff. They criticized the Xserver because they can not open
> more than about 80 windows at a time due to a resource limitation
> inside of X but they never run into memory problems under KDE2 (gcc
> version).
> Now I installed KDE3 from Stefan on my mashine to try it out and
> only the KDE3 desktop with some terminals and other desktop tools
> (not talking about MATLAB or a VHDL simulator, which is quit common
> to use for smaller tasks on our desktops here as well) let crash my
> Sun due to a shortage of memory !!!!
>
> I do not have a explanation for the tremendious increase in RAM
> usage. And this has been  the main reason for me not to start with
> a rollout of the otherwise stable KDE3 release from Stefan because
> I will have to repartition / reinstall all my Sun desktops.
>
> Any root cause explanation of this effect is very welcome and I
> would be very happy if the myth about KDE3 on 64MB RAM becomes a
> reality ;-)
>
> Just my experience, not a flame.
>
> Michael

-- 
Stefan Teleman          'Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition'
steleman at nyc.rr.com                          -Monty Python



More information about the kde-solaris mailing list