Update
This is going to be a short one since I just wanted to document the RAM gains I achieved by switching to nixOS and xmonad. If you haven’t read the first part, I am on a mission to get to the smallest amount of RAM used during everyday activities while still having a completely functional (hehe yay wordplay, nixOS is based on nix which is a functional programming language) and uncompromised system/experience. As mentioned in the first part, and still seems to hold true, xmonad has not made a meaningful impact on RAM usage but it doesn’t need sxkhd running to grab keybinds so that is one less thing running which is always good.
Results
In keeping consistent with the last post, let’s take a look at the new RAM numbers starting with the smallest. These numbers are with the exact same programs running as before.
As you can see, the RAM usage is almost at the limit already which you would think is bad but something interesting is going to happen.
Look at that! it barely went up at all. Let’s see if this a pattern.
So far the pattern holds true….
Spoiler, the pattern is about to crumble but it seems like for terminal things (most of my time) there’s barely any increase in RAM usage which is great! And shouldnt be surprising but this wasn’t the case before.
As expected, adding a gui web browser increased the RAM usage by an insane amount.
I forgot to get a screenshot of the system at idle but it sits around 870-890mb of RAM being used, which is quite a bit more than the 699mb from before. The starting point seems to be higher however, at least in my case on nixOS, it has a much smaller impact when we add running programs now which is exactly the behaviour I want. I think one of the reasons it starts higher is because I’m forced to use lighdm as my display manager instead of ly, which uses more RAM as it’s not a tui program but that is outweighed by the fact that on nixOS, packages are declared instead of being haphazardly installed (looking at you apt-get) so I have a lot less random junk on my system.
Conclusion
As is tradition, thank you for reading! I think this will be the last of the series as there really isn’t much to do from here without losing functionality, but never going above 1.2Gb of RAM usage except when using a gui web browser is really good and I think I’ll count that as mission success :) . Also I spent some time working on the css of the Bog so hopefully it looks a bit better and is not totally broken on smaller screens (it shouldn’t be). I’m not sure what the next one will be about, as always, however I’m getting close to finishing a couple projects so maybe on one of those? I also “hacked” my Wii (installed the homebrew channel) recently so hopefully I can do something cool with that and write about it.