RE: Re: Memory Issues

[Mart van de Wege <wege34 zonnet nl>]

Folks,

I must admit, the guy from my cable operator wil come by next
Friday, so I won't be able to comment on live Web performance,
but a few things come to mind:

1. I run Debian (potato) at the moment (used to be Red Hat 6.2), it
ships with all binaries stripped (ie no debug info), and all services
disabled by default. Even with X 3.3.6+Gnome, memory use
immediately after boot is some 40M (out of 128M) most of it
shared libraries. RH 6.2 with X 4.0+Helix Gnome is now installed
on a friends PC, it starts nice and clean with about the same
memory requirements. Resposiveness is about the same between
systems (mine a PIII 500/128M, his a Celeron 233/64M), OTOH I
have seen what Win98 did when Virtual Memory was turned of on
his machine, it gave Out Of Memory errors when opening only the
control panel straight after boot. So from experiencee I'd say that
Gnome is rather memory efficient, considering what it offers....

2. Re. Mozilla: I run an M16 on my machine. It browses only local
files at the moment (lots of docs to RTFM). It runs smooth and
hasn't crashed unexpectedly yet though I do subject it to some
punishment (try 'Gimp around in 80 minutes' frome the Gimp
manual if you have it. Fun!....Also my own HTML can be horribly
broken still.....). Again I'll try some live web pages in 2 weeks, so
this is not an exhaustive test. If you're only interested in browsing
and not filing bug reports, get the source and compile it with "--
disable-debug --disable-mailnews --enable-optimize", that ought to
give you a leaner and meaner lizard.

So, tweak your setup a bit, compile really critical apps yourself (get
SRPMS if you're on an rpm-based system) and you won't see any
memory or performance problems any time soon.

Mart van de Wege