[swlug] My attic based computer

[Justin Mitchell]

On 17 Jan, Tim Bonnell wrote:
> How do I know which modules withn the kernel are actually being used. I dont
> mean dunamic statistics, just which of the ethernet modules is being used,
> which graphics card module etc. so that I can exclude all others from my
> next compile.
If you are using a kernel as normally shipped by the main distributions,
just about everything that can be has been made into a loadable module.

Thus you can see with 'lsmod' which modules are currently loaded and
being used.

But, by the same point, you dont need to twiddle with the kernel compile
options any more, because all of the drivers just live in files, and are
only loaded into memory when theyre actually used. So the best you can
do is reclaim a small amount of disk space by deleting the modules you
dont want from the disk.

> My 'attic server' (and again I nust own up that its really in my TV room,
> but I'd like it to move closer to heaven one day) is currently a Pention 120
> with 128Mb memory, so I need to squeeze the best performance that I can out
> of it.
If this was a 486 with 8Mb of ram then maybe its worth quibbling over a
couple of compile options, but with 128Mb your really not going to gain
anything even vaguely noticable.

You would be much better of watching what daemons and other programs you
are running, they are the ones that will take all of the memory.
using something like 'ps aux' and look at the VSZ and RSS columns.
VSZ is the Virtual Memory size, and RSS the current amount of Physical
RAM in use by that program.

Also check the output of 'free', if the amount of swap used is
particularly large then the amount of memory is an issue, if its small
or nothing then the system has plenty of physical ram as nothing is
having to be swapped out to disk just now.

Note that the 'mem free' number is misleading as spare ram tends to get
called into use to increase buffers and caches until it is needed else
where.


> P.S. What happend to the old mailing list and web site? Have I missed a coup
> or something?
Well, the old list just up'ed and died on us, why darren chose to close
it so suddenly we have no idea, and there has been no sign of its
replacement. 

So rather than leave us all listless, I started up a new one so that we
can get on with business as usual.

This new list will not disappear without warning (barring hardware/telco
failures), and im hopeful of attracting a bit more group input to the
contents of the website and so on.

-J