> Of course. But I'm a laid-off engineer. If you like, I'd gladly take
> donations for more RAM. In the meantime, this machine remains 256M.
>
> This is a single-user desktop with no external access servers
> like SSH, Apache, or NFS running. I have a firewall to enforce
> no external access, which "stealths" all ports except the e-mail
> port, which is denied.
sshd takes little resources and I use it because I sometimes need to be
able to access my home machine from work. With a desktop, what really
matters is them memory hogs firefox, thunderbird and other GTK rubbish.
If opera's IMAP client was better, I would switch over completely. Or
maybe I should just try mutt again...
>
> I find that on my machine, memory usage often looks like this:
>
> Mem: 248088k total, 244192k used, 3896k free, 11860k buffers
> Swap: 524120k total, 182916k used, 341204k free, 43576k cached
>
Here is mine.
free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 503 440 63 0 84 233
-/+ buffers/cache: 122 380
Swap: 2047 0 2047
At the moment, there is nothing running except KDE and konsole with a
few terminals. swappiness set to 0 :D.
When I get firefox and thunderbird fired up, memory usage can go through
the roof so I have allocated 2GB (maximum swap partition size btw) for
my swap partition. I get the odd 1GB worth of swap once in a while that
takes quite a while to release when I close firefox and thunderbird...
So there you go. Set up as much swap as you need/want for a desktop.