[ale] SWAP over NFS

[Brian Pitts]

Chris Fowler wrote:
> I've been doing more playing and got SWAP over NFS to work via Xubuntu
> 7.10 on a machine with 128m of memory
> 
> It is becoming clear to me that to keep up with the latest software like
> firefox and a 64mb or even a 128mb diskless workstation no longer
> exists.  Xubuntu over NFS becomes useless once Xfce fires up.

Did you try lowering the value in /proc/sys/vm/swappiness ? Tuning 
Firefox [0]?

Xubuntu isn't as lightweight as an XFCE desktop could be. There's been a 
huge flamefest partly about this on xubuntu-devel over the last three 
months. It doesn't seem to be their fault, a representative comment is

"It's possible that Ubuntu base system has bloated instead of the ubuntu 
desktop itself, added more always running services etc.  Also, for 
example Gtk starting to use Cairo for (antialiased) drawing affected 
performance, but it had nothing to do with Xubuntu.   Similar ransitions 
have been also earlier, e.g. many years ago when font handling in Gtk 
moved to antialiased fonts with Xft..."

I've recently played around with Zenwalk [1] (formerly Minislack), an 
XFCE-focused Slackware derivative, one some older laptops. After logging 
in, memory usage is less than 64MB. That leaves a reasonable chunk for 
firefox.

[0] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(Firefox)
[1] http://www.zenwalk.org/

-Brian