[arch-general] A question about Arch Sixty Four

[Gary Wright]

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 11:02 PM, Keith Hinton <keithint1234 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all.
> I had a question about the sixty four bit port of Arch in general so figured
> this would be an okay place besides IRC to obtain any help I needed.
> I wanted to find out ruffly how much memory Arch sixty four will use for any
> program in general, regardless of GUI/console?

<snip>

> However I should mention that the host is 32-bit at
> present, and I was curious how much RAM is used in general under pure Arch
> 64?
> I would probably attempt to alocate about 3GB from the system.
> Anyone using virtualization  and VMs heavily on any platform is aware of the
> RAM requirements, surely.
> I was just curious if I'd be making a mistake and/or if this would be
> possible?
> Thanks!
>
> Regards, --Keith


Well, I'd say the difference between ram usage on lean install
(base,xorg,openbox,lxde-utils) between i686 and x86_64 is kilobites.
In fact, after running one install, and deciding to go with the other,
there was at most maybe a 1mb difference.  Its not much. (with that
setup, right after boot would weigh in 99mb ram used :))

As long as you keep the base system lean, 1gb is tons of free memory
to play with.  Hell, I have Gnome/Compiz and a ton of firefox tabs
running, and only 1gb ram installed, and 380mb ram still free
(cached... but free) Also, I think the benefit of being able to run
x86_64 guests would outweigh any penalty you'd be paying in larger
address space.

Gary