[hashhar]

If you set up your Linux distro from scratch you can easily manage under 200MB of RAM. I have an LFS I set up which idles at 150MB or so. A LOT of stuff is bloat in modern distributions.

I recommend everyone to try and build an LFS (Linux From Scratch) at least once or at least set up an ArchLinux box to get a feel for how Linux actually works and where the bloat is.

As an example, the music player daemon (MPD) has 110 dependencies among which is wayland or x-org, I don't know why.

Also, using udev to only load needed kernel modules helps with a lot of memory usage.

[ryandrake]

Can you recommend any good tools for measuring and plotting overall system memory usage over time? I always thought it would be a fun project to try to strip down a Linux distribution and see how low I could get worst-case memory usage.

[hashhar]

You can simply pipe top's output to a file using something like cron. There is a very good tool for boot times though integrated into systemd. Call it using `systemd-analyze`. It has a lot of subcommands you can check by `systemd-analyze --help`.

Also, if you'd like to compare performance degradation over time, NixOS is a good choice to run because it can simply rollback to old configurations and you can see what changed.

[hashhar]

If you could give me a brief list of what features you expect from such a tool I'll be happy to take it up as a project and release it.

[floatboth]

Don't reinvent collectd :)

[hashhar]

Thanks for the recommendation. Exactly what the parent commenter was asking for.

[ryandrake]

Yup, thanks, collectd seems to be exactly what I was looking for.