One thing that I see that could cut down on ram useage is using all KDE-based or gnome-based apps. I found out a while back that on me system with KDE and mostly K-apps, when I launched something like X-Chat or other GTK apps, the system crawled for a bit at 384MB of ram. So I switched to Konversation for IRC. End of problem. I mostly do web-based email now, and do RSS thru my Google homepage. Some of the other stuff I don't use.

A big system killer if you have ram below 1GB, is bit torrent downloads. At least as far as I can tell. I've had lockups on Linux and Windows with torrents running, IRC and Firefox with tabs open. PIII-500 with 384MB.

-----Original Message----- From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Luke-Jr Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 11:26 AM

On Wednesday 04 January 2006 17:10, Frank Wiles wrote:

which kills performance.

Or you could just use less applications at once.

Hence "Unless you use only very few applications at a time".

I run Gnome all day on a laptop with only 384 MBs of RAM. It's my

primary

work station and I never run into serious performance problems.

Perhaps you only do one or two things at a time and don't have on average over 50 windows open?

I typically have the following running constantly:

*) Several ( 5 or more ) terminals

I have at least that many, especially if you count each individual Konsole tab.

*) Sylpheed

Obviously a good idea to have a mail app open all the time ;)

*) Firefox with several tabs

Aww, cmon. Firefox is for Windows lusers... Those of us who use Linux-based OS have better browsers, namely Konqueror.

*) X-Chat

This used to eat a ton of RAM on my system until I limited its scrollback buffer...

*) Gaim

Not sure about Gaim, but Kopete can eat quite a bit of RAM. I like Psi's nice small footprint.

*) Lifrea

How's the RAM usage here? Akregator keeps all article summaries in RAM, and is eating 52 MB right now (usually more)