RAM shortage or competent programmer shortage?
Can't get a Linux box to idle (or even install) under 512M these days.
Can't find a web developer worth a shit who doesn't think he needs a Python backend application server to print "Hello, world" when you could do this with a static page served with something like OpenBSD with two-digit RAM requirements.
It's not the RAM that's changed; it's everyone around the RAM.
A coddled generation who were taught that AWS is the Internet and live in abstractions certainly hasn't helped.
My NixOS SSH jump host server here idles at 234 MB of which 64 MB is systemd-journald (which I assume can be reduced with some settings of how much to keep in RAM).
>which 64 MB is systemd-journald
why
Windows NT was routinely run with 32 MB of RAM TOTAL and the event log is basically unchanged 30 years later.
Achtung, you will draw the ire of the systemd downvote zealots.
Edit: Haha, withing a handful of seconds I got a downvote. :-D
>which 64 MB is systemd-journald
Wait till they rewrite it in Rust!
There are SoCs with 64 or 128 MB integrated, and people run reasonably complex stuff on it.
I still have 64 MB VPS (OpenVZ) which I use in production since 2012. It runs DNS, VPN, some logging stuff.
That is simply not true, Linux boots just fine with 8 MiB without MMU these days, which is half of the system memory I had available in 1995
You definitely can use Linux with few simple servers with 128 MB RAM.
Install can be tricky indeed, but if you have installed system, it's easier.
Yeah I'll need conclusive proof of that.
This is not difficult, you just need to run `htop` and perform addition of the RES column (which is in KB unless a unit is shown). Example:
>> You definitely can use Linux with few simple servers with 128 MB RAM. > > This is not difficult, you just need to run `htop` and perform addition of the RES column (which is in KB unless a unit is shown). Example:
I'm not quite sure what points this makes... That's supposed to fit on 128MB? And it doesn't include memory consumed by the kernel itself (which is not negligible at this scale), and linux needs spare for cache to work remotely decently.
I'm sure you can run a linux with 128MB of ram, but certainly not with systemd and a default kernel... Perhaps DSL (damn small linux) or alpine.The point was that most of the shown software is optional, and you can check how much selecting those parts you care about sum up to.
To provide "conclusive proof" that it's possible to run a 128 MB Linux system.
For example, if you remove (or configure smaller memory use for) journald, the Amazon daemon, oomd, timesyncd, you are already at around 128 MB userspace, with more that can be removed if desired.
And this is on a distro that is not at all designed to be minimal in memory usage.
How much cache is good depends entirely on what you want the system to do.
Toms root boot (TOMSRTBT) is what you need! Used to fit on a floppy disk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt
Why are you using systemd in a minimalist system?
I'm not trying to run a minimal system. This is just out of the box NixOS.
netBSD! ... o wait not linux... damn