FC3 sucks. It takes up too much memory!

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 04:35:04PM -0600, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> I wish people would get over the subject construction and deal with
> the problem being identified. The memory consumption of FCx systems
> is unusually high. I have been trying for years now to pin down exactly
> what process uses up all the processing power and memory an failed.
> Even though one can run FCx on a machine with 128M of memory it runs
> very slowly. At work being frustrated beyond belief by this phenomena
> I took out my checkbook and bought memory for a company owned machine.

Uninstall rhn-applet! Now!

Turn off any system services that you are not using.

GNOME uses a lot of resources; use XFCE instead.

If you must use GNOME, configure it to be lightweight.
(Google for discussions on the subject.)

    o Use a solid or simple pattern background -- no background images!

    o Use xterm, aterm, rxvt, or similar instead of GNOME Terminal.

Use a lower color depth in your X configuration, e.g., 16-bit color.

...

At the more extreme end:

Turn off SELinux, it consumes kernel memory.

Rebuild your kernel in a minimalist configuration with Matt Mackall's
2.6.X-tiny* kernel patch applied, all verbose debugging turned off, etc.
If you can't do this, *politely* ask someone to help you, or direct you
to someone with the same issues!

The simple fact is that FC3 is tuned feature-wise for "current" hardware;
nearly every new machine comes with a minimum of 256MB of RAM, tens of
GB of disk, and a CPU clock > 1GHz.  Running on less capable hardware is
possible, but involves compromises.

Good luck,

	Bill Rugolsky