Ramdisk fills upForum: Other Help Topics Topic: Ramdisk fills up started by: Gatu Posted by Gatu on Sep. 20 2005,10:12
Hi,I did a frugal install on a old laptop featuring 128 MB of ram. Now I want to install some dsls but fastly my ramdisk (about 92Meg) gets filled up so I cannot install any more stuff. I used home=hda5 and opt=hda5 and this seems to work well, so downloaded files are on hd not in ramdisk. But still there is not enough place. For the same reason I cannot install almost Debian applications, in this case also /var/cache/apt/archives gets filled, worsening my problem.... I wand to avoid the non-frugal hd install... Any ideas what I can do? Thx, Gatu Posted by adssse on Sep. 20 2005,14:03
I would suggest using .uci extensions whenever possible as these are much more ram friendly. I also have 128mb on my system, along with a 256mb swap and havent had much trouble so far. Do you have a swap partition? Also what kind of extensions are you installing? Some such as open office require alot of ram.
Posted by Gatu on Sep. 20 2005,14:15
Hi adssse,I used the GTK2 dsl and want to use gaim, gftp and some stuff more. This all is not available as uci. As soon as available I would like to install gpsdrive and kphone (I tried to install from debian but is does not install). I have 1G of swap, hd has 10G. The laptop is a Palmax with MediaGX CPU - 266 MHz and 128 MB of ram. The advantiage of the laptop is very small size (similar to Libretto). Problem seems to be that all this dsls install to the ramdisk... Br, Gatu Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 20 2005,15:19
That's correct...myDSL packages with a *.dsl extension install into ram. Those with *.tar.gz extension install into ram unless you use a persistent opt directory. Those with a *.uci extension are mounted, and don't really use much ram at all until you actually run the program.I don't know how ramdisk and swap interact, so i can't help with that. What I can say is that it's possible to move /usr to your harddrive so that all (or at least most) *.dsl packages are installed there instead of in the ramdisk. It would require su'ing to root, mounting the harddrive, copying /KNOPPIX/usr/ to the harddrive, deleting the /usr symlink, replacing it with a /usr directory, and mounting /mnt/path/to/new/usr to the new mountpoint (with --bind option). I'm not recommending this...just saying it's one way to avoid filling up your ramdisk. However, with that much disk space and that little ram, you might consider doing a "full" harddrive install instead of using frugal if you want to use the memory-hogging gtk2 applications. Posted by Gatu on Sep. 20 2005,15:54
Is there any method to change the ramdisk size on bootup?Boot option ramdisk_size=xxxxxxx did not work.... Where is the ramdisksize fixed? in lilo.conf there is nothing about... Br, Gatu Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 20 2005,16:57
I believe that the ramdisk size is determined by a calculation that is done in the init process that is based on total PC RAM capacity.
Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 20 2005,17:20
You already have most of your ram being used in the ramdisk...if you increase the size too much you'll be using nothing but swap for running applications, which will slow things down tremendously.
Posted by Gatu on Sep. 20 2005,18:29
Hi mikshaw,you are right, it would not help me too much... Would it make sense to put some of the directories inside the ramdisk on the hd? Like /var/cache/apr/archives which fills up everything as soon as I want to apt-get something? How can I move these files in a way which is recovered after reboot? A very excellent thing would be a program like mydsl-unload... this would help to clean the ramdisk... Br, Gatu |