DSL Tips and Tricks :: Memory saving ideas

Hi,

(typing this from a P266/32M machine)
Here's my experience with memory saving. Apart from the obvious turning off the background and the icons I came to think that bash eats too much memory. At a normal run of X, there are 3 bashes:
1) root's login shell;
2) user's login shell;
3) interpreter of startx.

I've dealed with them all to get bash-free memory. Here's how I did it.

1) I haven't found any better than append this to /etc/profile:

Code Sample

if [ x"/bin/bash" = x"$0" -a "$(whoami)" = "root" ]; then     exec su - dsl fi

This gives up root login shell. It will probably be bad for single-user mode but I don't care.

2) Added this to /home/dsl/.bash_profile:
alias startx="exec startx"
When you quit X, bash will be respawned by init. It works exactly as if bash was alive all this time except returning to the home directory.

3) Edited /usr/X11R6/bin/startx: changed the interpreter to /bin/ash and a couple of constructs looking like

Code Sample

if ! X; then Y fi

to

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if X; then :; else Y fi

.

Now when I start X torsmo shows 4.7M of taken memory (your mileage may vary since I have things like cardmgr). Together with kernel memory, it's about 8M of 32. So 32M isn't not that small after all

Hope that might help somebody.

Nice

To further save on resources, use $UID="0" instead of $(whoami)="root", since starting an app is way heavier than reading an environment variable.

Also you might want to compile your own kernel for that machine, it's a good way to spare some ram too.

Edit: Actually, why even put that into /etc/profile? Root's bashrc already does that (in runlevel 5 and without exec though), so it's kinda just duplicating effort