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Hi all,

I installed Gentoo two days ago, and it's running great with just a few
exceptions.

I was running a Fedora Core 2 installation before this. The RAM-usage of
Fedora usually was around 400-500MB of RAM right after graphical boot-up
in KDE. This was with prelinking turned on and the readahead and
readahead_early services running.

However, when I boot up my new Gentoo installation, the memory usage is
usually around 175-200MB RAM right after firing up KDE. Some would
consider this a good thing since Fedora is a little bloated, but I have
~1.3GB RAM and I want to use it.

Obviously this makes my system much slower since regular apps like Kmail
and the KDE control center take much longer to load, because they aren't
already cached for the most part.

I really want to continue using Gentoo but I can't seem to find out what
the problem is, exactly. I tried turning on prelinking, but this didn't
make a huge difference at all. I'm also trying to find out how to get the
readahead and readahead_early services running at boot-time, but no luck
so far. Are these services only available to Red Hat based distributions?

I was hoping one of you would know the answer, since switching back to
Fedora is obviously not an option . I'm running Linux kernel
2.6.8-gentoo-r1 for the record.

Christiaan wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I installed Gentoo two days ago, and it's running great with just a few
> exceptions.
>
> I was running a Fedora Core 2 installation before this. The RAM-usage of
> Fedora usually was around 400-500MB of RAM right after graphical boot-up
> in KDE. This was with prelinking turned on and the readahead and
> readahead_early services running.
>
> However, when I boot up my new Gentoo installation, the memory usage is
> usually around 175-200MB RAM right after firing up KDE. Some would
> consider this a good thing since Fedora is a little bloated, but I have
> ~1.3GB RAM and I want to use it.

So what is happening ?
Look at top and ps fax output to see where the memory goes - AFAIK there
are no options to force Linux to use more or less memory - it uses what
it uses.

As for prelinking (considering that you have never done that yourself
under BlackHat - they did it /for/ you), ISTR you need to compile the
libraries and binaries you want to prelink with the appropriate CFLAG.
-fPIC comes to mind ;-)

So do an emerge -uD world after changing your flags (and also add this
to the USE flag) and any revdepping that might be appropriate; then, and
only then, will it make sense and show a performance boost when you prelink.

> Obviously this makes my system much slower since regular apps like Kmail
> and the KDE control center take much longer to load, because they aren't
> already cached for the most part.

Not obvious at all.
Since these are likely to be applications you use often (WM config and
e-mail are generally used quite heavily - by me, at least) then just
load them on X startup.
Once started, you never need to shut them down again - not with 1GB + of
memory!

> I really want to continue using Gentoo but I can't seem to find out what
> the problem is, exactly. I tried turning on prelinking, but this didn't
> make a huge difference at all. I'm also trying to find out how to get the
> readahead and readahead_early services running at boot-time, but no luck
> so far. Are these services only available to Red Hat based distributions?

I would suppose they made these precaching thingies themselves, yes.


--
J

All your bits are belong to us - again.