Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

So, I got curious and either I suck at searching or missing the info or maybe it's not out there, but, which puppy versions use the least ram and cpu?

Bookworm64 is what I currently use and it does great overall, until a browser is started at least lol, but I wonder if there are less resource hungry puppies?

Like, do any of the currently active and updates puppies have the ability to live on a system with 1GB of ram? What about 512MB of ram? Dare I say, 256MB of ram?

In my day to day use of Bookworm64, it seems with the Floorp browser, total ram use averages around 3GB give or take. If I remember right, about 1.5GB no browser running.

@FloraMae :-

Heh. Dare I say it.....you're a bit behind the times there. The last Puppies I remember that were supposed to be fully "comfortable" with 512MB RAM would have been around the time of Lucid Puppy/Upup Raring/Precise 5.7.1. Well over a decade ago, some time before even I joined the community.

When I joined up in 2014, the up-to-date LTS Puppy that was released in November of that year - Tahrpup 6.0 CE; the first of the 'community' builds - was also the first Puppy 'recommended' to run from a 1 GB machine to be "happy". What you need to realise is, not only has Puppy slowly & steadily got bigger, all the apps you run in Puppy have also grown steadily larger, too.

A fully-functional Pup running in just 256MB RAM, in 2024, is something of a 'pipe-dream' now. Stuff like the Qt suites - which every dev out there is now building stuff against - are by themselves far bigger than your entire OS would need to be in this hypothetical dream-world.....

(*shrug*)

They call this progress, don'tcha know?

(I guess it's still possible to pare even a modern Puppy down to the size you're talking about, but it would be CLI-only, extremely minimal, and very constrained in what it could actually do....)

Mike.

FloraMae wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 9:09 pm

In my day to day use of Bookworm64, it seems with the Floorp browser, total ram use averages around 3GB give or take. If I remember right, about 1.5GB no browser running.

Not a puppy, but a Kennel Linux Void that runs at a base OS rate of about 300-400MB of ram is KLV-spectrwm, which uses a tiling window manager, no compositing etc. I run it on a 2GB ram netbook with a single 1.6 Ghz Celeron CPU, and it's remarkably snappy, but of course if you try to run youtube videos in a browser of any type, that will push to the 2GB limit pretty fast. When I do that, the video's audio runs consecutively and smoothly with no drop outs, but the video skips to keep up. Still amazes me that it doesn't crunch up and stop completely until it can process.

These days, ram and CPU requirements are now determined by the browsers and websites you frequent.

Right now I'm typing from a 20+ year old Dell XPS M1210 that was originally outfitted with winXP, and it's got 3GB of ram and a dual core 2GHz processor. It was a powerful "multi-media" machine in it's day, and I'm currently typing from KLV-airedale using Xfce, which runs youtube just fine. I teach music and this is parked at one of my locations, and I use it to play music and videos during lessons.

With LibreWolf opened to the forum it's reporting 1.04GB of ram. With youtube's front page loaded that jumps to 1.4GB of ram. With Ann Peebles Official Video of I Can't Stand the Rain running, that jumps to 1.5GB ram.

Also your performance will be affected by the CPU scaling governor.

@FloraMae - I made some puppy derivatives for older machines. I would recommend 2Gb ram, but 1Gb (maybe 512Mb) with a swapfile would work. Although I'm using an i5 with 12Gb ram, below are the usages for Fossa64-Medium, on Startup & then with Palemoon running:

@FloraMae

Perhaps I missed it, what computer do you have:
CPU=
Ram=

You might try F96CE_4 since it is lighter weight than BookworkPup64.

On my low power notebook, using pfix=nocopy
-startup ram = 235mb
-with Chromium Portable, forum tab open = 550mb

wizard

wizard wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 12:32 am

@FloraMae

Perhaps I missed it, what computer do you have:
CPU=
Ram=

You might try F96CE_4 since it is lighter weight than BookworkPup64.

On my low power notebook, using pfix=nocopy
-startup ram = 235mb
-with Chromium Portable, forum tab open = 550mb

wizard

Hmm, think I have ya beat wizard! Running a highly "wizzyfied" S15Pup32 on the old Acer Aspire One
Intel Atom netbook, N270 CPU, 1 gig RAM, 1 gig pupswap...at boot, it shows around 105mb used,
currently have chromium 124 running, 3 tabs open (blank start page, forum index and this post)
shows 242mb used, along with 264kb swap! Gotta love Slackware based Puppys! Also booted with
the nocopy option, frugal install to internal HDD.
Wiz

wizard wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 12:32 am

@FloraMae

Perhaps I missed it, what computer do you have:
CPU=
Ram=

You might try F96CE_4 since it is lighter weight than BookworkPup64.

On my low power notebook, using pfix=nocopy
-startup ram = 235mb
-with Chromium Portable, forum tab open = 550mb

wizard

My computer is about 15 years old if I'm not mistaken but not too bad on specs.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU M 640 @ 2.80GHz
7973MB (3331MB used) RAM

I see a lot of cheap computers with around 2-4GB of RAM and curious how well Puppy runs on them.

@Wiz57

Hmm, think I have ya beat wizard!

Showoff

Impressive on that hardware.

wizard

@FloraMae

With your hardware you should be able to run any Puppy with ease. You can check the Task Manager to see what is taking up the ram.

Thanks
wizard

wizard wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 1:16 am

@FloraMae

With your hardware you should be able to run any Puppy with ease. You can check the Task Manager to see what is taking up the ram.

Thanks
wizard

Browser. Seems all the browsers love munching on ram.

If you like BookwormPup64 but want something lighter maybe you'll like Vanilla Dpup. Under the hood it's mostly the same but has fewer packages installed out of the box (for example, no conky) and the preinstalled Firefox is tuned for low resource consumption. In general, it should consume less RAM and probably also less CPU. And it also includes bug fixes and optimizations (for example, much faster boot) not included in BookwormPup64 10.0.6.

If you have pfix=nocopy in the boot menu entry that is booting the Puppy version.

That is suppose to keep all of Puppy from loading into RAM.
Only what is needed to run the Puppy OS is loaded.
Anything not needed is kept unloaded and is loaded into memory as you select to use it.

Puppy is not the big RAM user as much as what program you try to run.
Some programs use a lot of RAM to operate.

bigpup wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 8:28 am

If you have pfix=nocopy in the boot menu entry that is booting the Puppy version.

That is suppose to keep all of Puppy from loading into RAM.
Only what is needed to run the Puppy OS is loaded.
Anything not needed is kept unloaded and is loaded into memory as you select to use it.

Puppy is not the big RAM user as much as what program you try to run.
Some programs use a lot of RAM to operate.

So far I've been quite happy with the os ram use. Without a browser open, it's around 1-1.5GB and I'm sure I could trim it down some if need be, but opening a browser (any main browser) seems to love to take at least 2GB of ram just for the browser. The highest I've seen with multiple tabs in floorp is around 2.5-3GB for the browser. This is also with some addons which I'm sure increase ram use.

I wish there were better browser options for low-ram computers because there are a lot of cheap to free used computers out there that still work just fine, they just happen to not have much ram.

FloraMae wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 9:09 pm

In my day to day use of Bookworm64, it seems with the Floorp browser, total ram use averages around 3GB give or take.

I'm not familiar with the Floorp browser, but 3Gb RAM use seems a bit excessive. Could just be me though.

FloraMae wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 1:01 am

I see a lot of cheap computers with around 2-4GB of RAM and curious how well Puppy runs on them.

4Gb of RAM should be plenty to run any Puppy. Up until recently I was running MX Linux on a 2009 laptop with 4Gb RAM. No problems. I would even expect most Puppies to run ok with 2Gb RAM. As for 1Gb, probably the respins done by @ozsouth would be worth looking at. I think it's possible with a lightweight browser. Might have a play with one of them myself.

Also the way in which you use the browser can have an effect. I don't have much problem because I don't have multiple tabs open at the same time. It's simply due to the way I work, I don't do multi tasking. I've always been a strictly "one thing at a time" type of person, but that's just me.

dimkr wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 6:41 am

If you like BookwormPup64 but want something lighter maybe you'll like Vanilla Dpup. Under the hood it's mostly the same but has fewer packages installed out of the box (for example, no conky) and the preinstalled Firefox is tuned for low resource consumption. In general, it should consume less RAM and probably also less CPU. And it also includes bug fixes and optimizations (for example, much faster boot) not included in BookwormPup64 10.0.6.

Hi dimkr, to which of your Vanilla-Dpup's are you referring. I get lost by your naming convention and the structure of your Section. I think 9 has been deprecated and 11 is developmental. But a direct link to current 10's ISO thread would help.

mikeslr wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 5:00 pm

I think 9 has been deprecated and 11 is developmental. But a direct link to current 10's ISO thread would help.

viewtopic.php?t=7656 is sticky and explains the differences and links to downloads, so does https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/.

I just happened to add RAM to my AIO computer. I can't squeeze more than 4 GB anymore, but at least this way. Yes, I have spoiled myself too much with large volumes on other computers

I came to the conclusion that it is best to make your own OS build for a specific machine. With flags during compilation and so on.

At first, I wanted to use a makeshift 32-bit OS compiled specifically for an old machine... But since memory has become 4 instead of 2, plus Intel Atom D410 supports 64 bits... I decided to use something more or less standard to avoid problems in the future.

I also have an MSI Wind U100 netbook. It's about the same beast (Atom N270) as @Wiz57 's, only 2 GB of memory But there is a VGA connector for an external screen - It can be used somehow.

@Grey

An offer of a new ISO would be welcome

Jasper wrote: ↑Fri May 17, 2024 3:17 pm

new ISO

First, I want to try how systemd will behave there. It's possible that I won't like the result, but I'm very curious. Because Linux users always have hopes (unlike Windows users)