Feedback

[Martin Herrman <m.herrman@student.tue.nl>]

I read the small-memory mini howto written by Todd
<ttburgess@uoguelph.ca> but had some problems with the things he says in
the document. That's why I sent him an e-mail but the mail was
undeliverable. What to do next? The email I tried to send:

Dear Todd,

While I was looking for a howto my eye fell on the 'small memory' howto
you wrote. Because I'm a tuning-freak I start reading. My kernel is
optimized, deamons I don't use are shut down, but I am using 7 VC's on
my RedHat Linux 6.1. Because I only need 4 I would like to disable 3 of
them. So I opened my inittab file and discovered that your Howto wasn't
right! It says:

 2. Look for a line which looks like (the key feature being a line
       which starts with c1):
       c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty tty1 38400 linux
       Start at the highest number (ie c6) and comment it out by
       inserting a '#' in the first row. Repeat this step as many times
       as needed. Remember every line you comment out is one less VC
       running.

While my inittab says:

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

(and of course it says a lot more). So I asked on a newsgroup and the
told me to put a # before the last three lines of the above fragment.
Your howto also says:

3. Re-boot the system for your changes to take effect.

But that isn't true. From the same newsgroup I received:

/sbin/init q
or
sighup: kill -1 1


Then my last point: the howto says:

"On average running 6 VCs requires about 4MB of memory. Removing a
couple of them can free up a couple MBs of memory."

Is that true? One guy using Suse says that one VC uses about 370 kb (so
that would be an improvement for me: 3x370kb = 1 mb), but another says
that that a VC only uses about 4 kb and that in X they will be swapped
to disk, so I won't see any difference. Now I would like to know what
your thoughts were to 'free up a couple MBs of memory'. A couple is at
least two, but i don't think a system is very usefull with only 1 VC
available. Please let me know your opinion about this.

bye,

Martin

I hope someone will be able to do something with this information.

Martin

--
NIEUW! Linux Gebruikers Handleiding v1.2 : http://www.student.tue.nl/m.herrman/
Linux RedHat 6.1 Kernel 2.2.14-15mdk  Toshiba P233 MHz, 32 Mb RAM
3:10pm up 3:30, 1 user, load average: 0.26, 0.29, 0.39
Western Civilization, that would be a good idea!




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