On Jan 4, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 07:34:13PM +0530, Kumar Appaiah wrote:Dear Debian users, A couple of my friends who were using Sarge, on machines with 128 MBof RAM and 256 MB of RAM have complained that an upgrade from Sarge toEtch has slowed their machine down considerably. This is irrespective of the Window Manager. Is there any particular reason why this could be happening? I could not pin down anything in particular which could cause this to happen.maybe its a memory issue? My understanding is that the etch kernel is much bigger than the sarge kernel. that is entirely anecdotal as I have no sarge box to compare to. A
The standard etch kernel is already modularized as far as possible, so recompiling won't reduce its memory footprint by much if at all.
Also, the kernel is by far not the most egregious of the things that have increased memory footprint between sarge and etch. Your time will be much better spent in figuring out how to eject many/most of the various "services" gnome gratuitously drags in.
Somebody else in this thread mentioned that the gnome folks are working on making it more small-memory friendly. If that work hasn't made it into etch, it would be worth taking a look at for system tuning ideas.
On the other hand: RAM is cheap. Unless your systems are limited by design constraints to their present small RAM, it might be worth a trip to the local computer store for a RAM upgrade.
Enjoy! Rick