Re: Upcoming FTPMaster meeting
On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 10:17:59PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:
>
> > On ARM, it's 90MB, I guess MIPS should be similar.
> > The man page says 65MB even in -9, but I guess they didn't count in the
> > code, libc, buffers and the likes.
> >
> My OpenMoko FreeRunner phone is an ARM device that has 128Mb RAM and
> runs pure Debian armel. Only time I need to kill things to during an
> upgrade is when I'm upgrading the locales package or lintian, creating
> locales files seems to take a lot of memory and the process gets
> killed sometimes.
Decompression and generation of locale files never go together, so this
shouldn't be a problem.
As others have noticed, reducing the compression level can reduce memory
requirement to a single digit, and that dpkg-dev already uses -6 rather than
-9 by default. I believe it might be a good idea to go back to -9 on big
architectures, but this is a detail that can be changed later. For now,
it's important to know if it's save to enable xz everywhere, and it appears
it is. If indeed xz -6 takes only 9MB to decompress, even Jarek's machine
with 64MB should handle it without a swappeathon.
I didn't check this myself, but I'm told that when xz has to swap (and not
merely evict other processes away), its memory usage pattern is so bad that
a file normally processed in ten seconds can take an hour. Thus, using 9MB
vs 90 makes quite a difference.
--
1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor:
// Never attribute to stupidity what can be
// adequately explained by malice.
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