Arch Linux

11010010110

Member

Registered: 2008-01-14

Posts: 284

what does make a distro heavy ?

I tried to show a friend the system requirements of some distros. i installed them on a pentium 3 1GHz 256 M ram comp

One of the distros tested was Mandriva one from which i am writing now

It works quite slow and not very responsive. This is a heavy distro on a not new comp

It used up all the ram and about 100 M swap

CPU is on 20 % load when system is idle

I tried to check what exactly in the distro makes it heavy so i opened KDE process manager (its like Top but graphical) and watched

There are allmost no Mandriva - specific heavy processes. Its the same programs as in Arch on Gentoo or Knoppix but they eat up more ram and resources. Why do they behave differently here ?

What may take all this 20 % CPU on idle ? the processes in the process manager sum up to much less

How can programs actually be so heavy ? The panel on the bottom of the screen 14 M. Some notification daemon 7 M. Power saving applet 10 M. The process manager itself 14 M. Even daemons look oversized

Its even worse in the vmsize (grey background) column. The panel there is 45 M

Hohoho

Member

Registered: 2007-06-23

Posts: 222

Re: what does make a distro heavy ?

The number you want to look at is resident memory, not vmsize.
vmsize includes shared memory and that inflates the number quite a lot.

11010010110

Member

Registered: 2008-01-14

Posts: 284

Re: what does make a distro heavy ?

The number i quoted in the first place (panel = 14 M) is the resident size

In the screen shot the grey column is vmsize and the one to the right of it is vmrss