Fedora 18 Beta to slip by two weeks, Beta release date is now Nov 27

[Panu Matilainen]

On 11/09/2012 07:15 PM, Peter Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 05:33:05PM +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
>> On 2012-11-09, 14:30 GMT, David Cantrell wrote:
>>> Just to cite similar complaints I see from time to time...  It
>>> irritates me that people think it's a problem that in 2012 they can't
>>> install in a VM that is allocated with 256M of RAM.  Allocate
>>> a reasonable amount, start over.  Your host system for multiple VMs in
>>> 2012 should not have 1G of memory.
>>
>> Does it really irritate you? Those are strong words ... anyway.
>>
>> I will risk your irritation, anger, maybe even rage (after all, their
>> impact is limited over IRC) and let me ask:
>>
>> a) Why installer requires 2-4 times more memory than any other program
>> running on my computer (and the software you use on it could be a good
>> example of SOHO server)?
>
> The installer's memory footprint is largely bound by the size of the
> package set. So, for example, a yum "upgrade" will take more ram -
> because there are effectively twice as many packages involved.
>
> There may be ways to reduce how much of that needs to be kept in ram
> at a time, but those are things for yum/rpmlib - they're not anaconda
> changes.

Except that rpm (and yum) use a lot LESS memory these days than they did 
in the RHEL-5 era, which I think was used as a comparison here. That's 
not where all the memory has gone, quite the contrary.

	- Panu -