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

[Eva Brucherseifer]

I can confirm the same. If Solaris uses significantly more memory than Linux 
running the same software, I'd say that Solaris is quite broken. I don't 
believe this though.

To compare things: The linux machines I administrate usually have 512MB and 
about 1G swap. Running KDE alone with kmail, multiple instances of konqueror 
and konsole, maybe some kdevelop's opened I don't need any swap. Usually swap 
is needed if I open several instances of OpenOffice or Matlab. I am 
developing an application for analysis loading masses of data which needs  
additional 40MB and I still don't have any problems. 

I really think, something else is broken for those people who have problems 
with a similar or even larger memory setup.

Greetings,
eva

Am Mittwoch, 28. Januar 2004 02:42 schrieb Stefan Teleman:
> 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