Re: lynx-dev a small, poor, 4Mb laptop in the suburbs of Dakar, Senegal (fwd)

[Klaus Weide]

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, David Woolley wrote:

> You can definitely run earlier versions in 4MB on Linux and probably run
> current ones in that memory and without heavy thrashing; you can
> certainly run the current version in 6MB on Linux.  I would expect
> Lynx to thrash in 4MB on SCO v4.2.  SCO v4.2 does a fixed partitioning
> between disk cache and code space, so a 4MB system would have very little
> code space; Linux (and NT) uses a common pool of memory for both, so is
> less likely to go into swapping in this sort of configuration.
> 
> Note that Linux, as well as SCO systems bloat with time, so you might
> find it better to use an old distribution if you are prepared to move
> from SCO.

Yeah I was wondering too, why SCO.


One can, and maybe should, also limit the memory used.  For example
from a bash or other Bourne-ish shell, with the ulimit command.

I test that sometimes for a small value; lynx can *usually* recover
when memory becomes exhausted while loading one of several files that
are too big.  (But it also might just quit abruptly.)  There are some
checks I added a long time ago that try to detect memory exhaustion
and deal with it gracefully, in the place where it is most likely
to happen (cf. CHECK_FREE_MEM in GridText.c).

   Klaus