Haiku devours RAM on old computer

[Giova84]

hrev 46301

Well, i installed again Haiku on an old computer: an Acer Veriton 9100, which is provided with 256 MiB of DRAM. The last time which i have used Haiku on this pc, I was using Alpha 3, but due to bug #8136, i didn't used often this PC. In anyway, differently from the last time, now Haiku DEVOURS the RAM on this PC. Just opening WebPositive (also without any webpage opened) and i can see 241 MiB of ram occupied, and opening applications, take a while. Eg. opening the "About this system" take about 5 seconds. The situation is worst if i attempt to open more complex apps. Obviously i have activated the virtual memory (with auto management). But Haiku, on this computer, is almost unusable. Obviously i don't pretend that this PC should work like a dual core with 6 GiB of ram (my main pc), but, to do a comparision, Windows XP works decently on this Acer Veriton. Maybe the work on the Scheduler ​http://www.haiku-os.org/blog/paweł_dziepak/2013-10-21_scheduler_work_progress will help the situation?

[anevilyak]

If you're swapping, the scheduler isn't going to do anything for you. It's simply a question of what's using up all the memory, though given that nightlies are built with various debug flags activated, chances are some of that is going to increase mem consumption anyhow.

[Giova84]

Yeah, obviously you're right. I mentioned the scheduler here, because i was reading this (related) ticket https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/8136#comment:7

Maybe is better if i only use Haiku on my main pc :-)

[axeld]

Please use proper links to tickets and comments, ie. #8136 or [ticket:8136] or [ticket:8136#comment:1].

[axeld]

It's very well possible that the package management takes its toll. 256 MB isn't really that much, and I assume that the package management possibly hasn't been tuned for low memory systems at all (and therefore caches as much as possible).

[Giova84]

Upgrading to 512 MiB of ram would be enough, for this situation?

[pulkomandy]

Web+ is also quite memory hungry currently (there is room for some optimization). Have you tried a less complex web browser such as BeZilla or NetSurf or even Qupzilla? Does that make a difference?

[Giova84]

Yes: I've tried QupZilla and works slightly better, but the fact is that Haiku itself, on older PCs with a small amount of RAM, is very slow and unresponsive. I have another similar PC (with 256 MiB of RAM) and the situation is the same: just when i reach the Desktop, I can see that I have a very small amount of free memory. Here: ​https://www.haiku-os.org/about/faq#hw_1 is claimed that "Haiku will run on a Pentium or better CPU with 128MiB of RAM" and then "However, for a satisfactory user experience, we recommend at least a Pentium III with 256MiB of RAM". But currently these information, unfortunately, doesn't reflect the reality: on an old PC with at least 512 MiB of ram, the user experience is satisfactory, with 256 MiB of RAM the user experience is frustrating.

[nielx]

Remove milestone for tickets with status = closed and resolution != fixed