[CentOS] Low RAM

Tue Jul 19 19:26:37 UTC 2005
Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>

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On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 01:38:47PM -0500, User Lists wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>  Is it possible to install (and run) CentOS-3 with
> only 160 MB of RAM?? Have I put special params to boot
> it??
> 
> Thank you very much 

It will repends on what you are going to do with that machine.

I'll be installing (tomorrow) a CentOS 4.1 machine with 64MB RAM.
It will be a minor firewall/router machine for a small office (10
computers behind it), without anything fancy on it. And, of course,
no X Environment.

You can actually run CentOS with even less RAM. 32MB would be the bare
minimum, if you ask me. It only depends on what you are running on
that machine.

If you are planing on having a workstation (Gnome, KDE etc), then
you should not even think of starting without 256MB RAM. If you
are going for a low weight WM (IceWM, Blackbox etc), then it might
work with 128MB or 160MB.

Unless you have some deep Linux experience (5y+, minimum), I don't
recomend trying any creative tricks, since know the memory footprint
of each component can be tricky, specially since those will change
depending on the version, or even interation with other components.

As a rule of thumb:

Barebones network device (kernel + bash + sshd): 64MB min
Barebones network server (kernel + dhcp + sshd + small stuff): 128MB min
Barebones workstation: 256MB min

By barebones I mean you will have to do a lot of micro-customization
to make sure there is nothing running that isn't really needed. Not
to mention some heavy footwork regarding partition positioning on
the disk, to reduce seek times, something not easy to do on CentOS
(diskdruid(?) has a mind of its own).

[]s

- -- 
Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>
"Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur"
"Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)

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