[TEAM] Modifying the minimum required RAM

[Peppe Korg]

Hi,

I'm Peppe and I've recently joined the community, here is my personal
experience:

I gave it a try running a VM with 512Mb RAM and having: Firefox,
listening to some music with Parole and using Writer: system is not that
smooth
until everything is up and running and even after that starting new
programs takes a while.
Normal user,I think, would browse the web (if not watching youtube
videos) while chatting or writing email which is not that smooth with
512Mb, you have to be patient with it.

1Gb much better.

Probably 512Mb is enough for people looking for specific applications
(like specific hardware config) but those are aware there are some
limitations and expecting some performance
degradation.

Thx,

Peppe.


On 24/01/2017 20:59, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 01/24/2017 11:29 AM, Dave Pearson wrote:
>> Just ran some tests on yesterdays Zesty 64bit ISO on a Virtual Box VM
>> set for
>> 1GB ram.
>>
>> Even with the slight performance loss on running on a VM, I was working
>> acceptably with File manager, Firefox (two tabs) Gnome software,
>> terminal and
>> Calc (slight delay on Calc straight after swapping from Software to
>> Calc, but
>> after a few second that stopped.
>>
>> But looking at 'Top'  Gnome software and Calc were the biggest memory
>> uses.
>
> I think that's just because they map a lot of files, it's
> not real memory usage.
>
> Instead of "top", use e.g. this tool:
>     http://packages.ubuntu.com/yakkety/smem
>     https://www.selenic.com/smem/
>
> And look at the PSS information.
>
> (PSS information changes depending on how many apps are running
> as unlike RSS & VmSize, it takes memory sharing into account.)
>
>
>> I usually do my iso testing on VM's with 2GB of ram, and while you do
>> get a much
>> better perforamce with 2, those people who will be using older
>> hardware with
>> 1GB, would know not to expect to run loads of apps at once and expect
>> a fluid
>> performance.
>
> Most of the apps are fine in 1GB even if you run a lot of them.
>
> Only things like www-browsers, LibreOffice and manipulating large
> images e.g. in Gimp are really memory hungry.
>
> (Real-time video editing is already otherwise too demanding for
> these machines. :-))
>
>
>     - Eero
>
>
>>     On 24 January 2017 at 01:32 Pasi Lallinaho
>> <pasi at shimmerproject.org> wrote:
>>
>>     Canonical developers do not benchmark or run any regular testing on
>>     Xubuntu; this is not their work. Whether they do that for Ubuntu, I
>>     don't know. To be exact, Canonical "only" offers the
>> infrastructure for
>>     Xubuntu.
>>
>>     If there are volunteers who are willing to set up a benchmarking
>>     process, run the benchmarks and ideally work on improving code in
>> order
>>     to succeed better in the benchmarks, we're totally welcoming them.
>>
>>     I haven't run Xubuntu on low-memory (virtual) machines lately, so
>> I have
>>     no idea what the usability is below 2GB RAM, but I'm pretty sure
>> it's
>>     usable.
>>
>>     Setting the minimum any higher than the "acceptable" doesn't make
>> any
>>     sense. If we consider 1GB memory bringing an acceptable
>> experience but
>>     set the minimum to 2GB, we could potentially turn out people with
>> just
>>     1GB memory – just by telling the minimum is 2GB. In other words, by
>>     setting the minimum too high, we would put Xubuntu out of reach
>> for some
>>     users only *socially* (as technically they could still run Xubuntu).
>>     This is why the minimum should be as low as possible.
>>
>>     Ultimately smoothness and acceptable responsiveness is very
>> subjective;
>>     this is why we have minimum and recommended. Maybe you're saying
>>     recommended should be 2GB; if the minimum is 1GB, this sounds
>> sensible.
>>
>>     Cheers,
>>     Pasi
>>
>>     On 2017-01-24 02:49, JMZ wrote:
>>
>>         Do Canonical developers routinely benchmark xubuntu (and other
>>         flavors) against a Windows or Mac OSX version? In other
>> words, should
>>         the recommended xubuntu RAM size be sufficient to run
>> programs at a
>>         speed similar to the memory-hungry programs on a Windows or
>> Mac box
>>         (Office, Internet Exploder, etc.)? For xubuntu, I'm thinking
>> of the
>>         Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice triad in particular. As
>>         flocculant wrote, 1024 MB should be the very minimum. I would
>> say
>>         2048 MB should be the minimum, but that would place xubuntu
>> out of the
>>         reach of many computer users globally.
>>
>>         Jordan
>>
>>         On 01/23/2017 06:29 PM, Pasi Lallinaho wrote:
>>
>>             What is comfortable is definitely subjective, but I think
>> the minimum
>>             system requirements should reflect an environment where
>> you run one
>>             resource-intensive application at a time at most. Or in
>> other words,
>>             you shouldn't expect to be able to edit high quality
>> video and watch
>>             another at the same time smoothly with the minimum
>> requirements.
>>             However, you should be able to be somwhat productive with
>> your work
>>             with those resources.
>>
>>             Cheers,
>>             Pasi
>>
>>     --
>>     Pasi Lallinaho (knome) › http://open.knome.fi/
>>     Xubuntu Website Lead & Council member › http://xubuntu.org/
>>     Shimmer Project co-founder › http://shimmerproject.org/
>>     Ubuntu member
>>
>>     --
>>     xubuntu-devel mailing list
>>     xubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
>>     https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-devel
>>
>>
>>
>