Free Memory Vs. PND's installed

[Hooka]

So I recently came to the conclusion that although my 128GB SDXC card may very well fit the entire pandora collection... plus some, it seems instead of 140+MB free memory with the SD not inserted in XFCE (and 185MB in minimenu) - I wind up with 60MB free (or 110 in minimenu). I'm starting to wonder if there is not either a more efficient way to populate the menu or entirely too much extra crud being loaded with no reason for it to be there (filling ram with screenshot files that the desktop menu will never show, reserving upto 255 characters for a title when most are under 32, etc.

So, I guess my plan is to find one of my old 4-16GB cards and putting the more memory demanding stuff on it apart from the others and leave my big card for the majority of PND's that don't need 100+MB. Then I can avoid a swapfile a little easier...

 

[levi]

As far as I know, the xfce menu doesn't load any screenshots to populate its menu, so that can't be the reason for any less RAM while your SD card is inserted.

I can't comment on Minimenu, as I don't know its internals at all. The maximum title length has no bearing on the size of the configuration file that populates the xfce menu though - it perhaps makes the PNDs themselves slightly larger (although probably not given the max length is 255 - they're probably storing the length in a byte, hence the space required is always the actual length + 1).

How many PNDs are we talking about here by the way?  According to the repo there are 1415 apps on there at the time of writing - do you have them all?  75MB for minimenu means an average of 53kB per PND on average (and XFCE's gap of 80MB would suggest a similar value there), of which about 10kB probably contains the compressed icon for the PND.  I can't explain where the other ~40kB are coming from though.

 

[notaz]

How are you checking free memory? Many people somehow miss the cache, i.e. the Linux kernel keeps a lot of recently used stuff in RAM just in case if anyone needs it again, and if some program asks for memory, it then unloads the cache and gives the memory to whomever needs it. Even modern Windows do the same thing.

Proper way to check free RAM is to run "free -m" and look at the "-/+ buffers/cache:" line.

For me it's mostly the same when SD with lots of  PNDs is inserted or not.

 

[Hooka]

Notaz: You're right... was looking in pandora sysinfo and cache is chewing up a large percentage of that...

As for how many PND's... 1300+, a few probably not in the repo anymore/never were type idea...

 

[_wb_]

Notaz: You're right... was looking in pandora sysinfo and cache is chewing up a large percentage of that...

As for how many PND's... 1300+, a few probably not in the repo anymore/never were type idea...

In sysinfo, the used memory is colored red and the available memory is colored green.

Cache/buffers are colored dark green, unused memory is bright green.

In principle, all cache/buffer memory is available, it's just the kernel keeping things in memory for efficiency, e.g. in case you want to read bytes from a file again that have been recently read, those bytes can be retrieved from the cache in memory instead of having to redo the SD card read operation, which would take more time. This is why if you start a small program (or PND) two times in a row, it will load a lot faster the second time.

Since the pnd scan thing is reading lots of bytes to collect the metadata from all those PNDs, the cache will get filled with that. No need to worry about it.