Re: any tips for how to tune Gnus/emacs for low memory usage?

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Steinar Bang wrote:
>>>>>> Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>:
> 
>> You have barely enough memory for the X server, and not nearly
>> enough for X and Emacs.
> 
> Running KDE or Gnome is out, but the X server itself isn't all that
> much of a hog.  And I'm using icewm as the WM, which uses only around
> 800k.

Quite. X, contrary to rumors, is rather light-weight. I happily ran it
on my P-133 with 24MB of ram for an awful while. :)

> No problem at all running X and emacs without swapping... until I've
> used Gnus to visit one of the newsgroups that makes the emacs process
> size ballon.
> 
> The two big culprits, according to top, are emacs/Gnus (after visiting
> one of the problem groups), and opera.

The best I ever found for keeping the size of the Emacs process that was
running stuff down was to keep Gnus distinct from my standard Emacs[1],
to ensure that W3 was *not* available under Gnus, and to make sure I
never kept ticked articles lying around for long.

Oh, and I had fairly small groups at the time, though that doesn't seem
to have made that much difference...

> I'll try out galeon when it moves out of debian unstable, and into
> testing.  

I doubt that you will be happy; this is a very light session:

 3633 daniel     9   0 45040  41M 18224 S     0  0.0 14.5   2:59 galeon-bin
 3638 daniel     9   0 45040  41M 18224 S     0  0.0 14.5   0:00 galeon-bin
 3639 daniel     9   0 45040  41M 18224 S     0  0.0 14.5   0:04 galeon-bin
 3640 daniel     9   0 45040  41M 18224 S     0  0.0 14.5   0:00 galeon-bin
 4788 daniel     9   0 45040  41M 18224 S     0  0.0 14.5   0:00 galeon-bin
 6786 daniel     9   0 45040  41M 18224 S     0  0.0 14.5   0:00 galeon-bin

That's not exactly a light-weight browser, and it bloats relatively fast.

> But I don't really have a replacement candidate for Gnus.

I never met anything better. :0

> I'll also try out the 2.4-series to see if the VM is more efficient.

It's a heavier footprint than 2.2 but 2.4.16-pre1 and close to that are
fairly good. They swap sooner, feel decent interactively and don't have
too many harsh edges.

        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  I did this briefly, but stopped for the lack of integration.

-- 
There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex.
As well to speak of a female liver.
        -- Charlette Perkins Gilman, _Women and Economics_