Reducing the ramdisk size?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Reducing the ramdisk size?
started by: DarkNova

Posted by DarkNova on June 16 2005,20:59

I'm running DSL on a machine with only 32MB of RAM. I'm working on remastering it to use it as a digital picture viewer, so the user doesn't really need to be opening up other applications as there will be no/little user interface. Right now DSL creates a 20MB ramdisk and so once everything starts my machine only has about 2MB of RAM free and that causes problems (I'm running off a USB key and don't have a swap drive). Does anyone know how I can change the size of the ramdisk that's created? Only about 3% of the 20MB is used so I would think I could reduce it to 5-10MB and that would greatly help the running applications. Thanks.

Posted by Guest on June 17 2005,23:28

Although the size of the ramdisk is "fixed" at boot, actually this is just the maximum size that it can get. The actual size of the ramdisk is dynamic, and the presence of a swap partition/file will help because the inactive files are usually moved from the ramdisk to swap whenever there is a need for more memory.

If you observe the memory usage indicator, you see that 20MB is already consumed at boot-up to XWindows. This is not due to the ramdisk. It is due to the number of stuff (icons, dockapps, background graphics, etc...) that load-up automatically at boot-up. So if you want to reclaim this memory, make sure these unnecessary apps do not load-up. cbagger01 has posted some pointers in doing this. Search the forums for his postings on this matter.

Posted by Guest on June 22 2005,22:32

If you don't feel like searching, here are a few tips:
remove everything but "fluxbox" from your /home/dsl/.xinitrc file.

In your lilo/grub config, use the kernel flag ramdisk=10000000 (a little under 10MB). Also, use the vga=normal flag (framebuffer uses ram)

Set up a swap file, like said.

Use the vesa x server (framebuffer's not there).

Disable as much in the way of hardware detection using kernel flags (usb and network should be sufficient for this purpose).

Use runlevel 1 (or S). Save yourself some of the ram used when multiple users are supported.