Low Memory Hacks for gnome.

This page http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction/LowMemoryHacks describes some tricks/hacks to use gnome on a low memory machine.

I am running gnome on a 184mb Mac Powerbook G3. One of the things that helped me avoid swapping allot, but is missing from the website is replacing gnome-terminal by xterm, or urxvt. Gnome terminal is one of the biggest memory eater on my system. Another thing I do is setting metacity to reduced resource usage. (you can do this with gconf editor in /apps/metacity/general/), this often speeds up things like dragging windows around.

And I wouldn’t be me if I wouldn’t use this as a mpd/gmpc commercial. Mpd is low-resource and allows you to maintain a large music collection on low end hardware, I have ran mpd with 8000 songs on a 166mhz laptop with 28 mb ram.

Q

2 Comments

  • March 1, 2008 - 11:43 pm | Permalink

    Wow..that’ s indeed an extreme difference between an open xterm (7KB) and a Gnome-terminal (9,1MB). Thx.

  • March 1, 2008 - 11:50 pm | Permalink

    gnome terminal easily takes up 30-130mb depend on how many open.
    this is a more recent versions, older version easily used 300+ mb.

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