In trying to provide a full fledged desktop that can run on aging computers, system memory usage is an important factor. Every 1mb counts, I feel this way regardless of whether its a new system and especially an older system. With multiple programs open and numerous tabs open in your browser, memory flies out the window handling all these request, and lets not even factor in videos and or flash content, or really any social media site.

I scoured through the system and enabled a couple techniques to keep memory down. Now some may argue. Hey I don't think that should have been done, or I would have done it this way. And to that I say, I hear ya and that's why I'm writing this post.

Two tricks I'll start off with that you can decide to alter, remove or change completely. Between these two tricks I was able to save about 30-50 megs in ram usage and occasional pauses while these programs were running in the background.

First the big one. I removed 'Update Notifier', not update manager, but update notifier. What, what, what.....? Now before everyone goes OMG, its really not that big of a thing. What I decided to do is go with a small simple script instead that I titled update reminder. Update notifier is quite the memory pig to be sitting at idle periodically checking for updates and bringing up the window, usually somewhere between 15-20 megs of ram.

The simple update reminder script on the other hand uses essentially no memory and simply launches 'Update Manager' periodically throughout the day. Simply reminding you to check for updates. This file is located in the /.config/autostart directory and the times between the intervals can be adjusted to your liking. You can also choose to remove it all together and just install update-notifier again through synaptic and proceed as normal.

The second thing was I ripped out 'Zietgeist' which in ubuntu is a service which logs the users’ activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations had. It makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

I have personally ripped this out of every system I've ever used and have seen 0 detrimental effects. However, this doesn't mean that everyone doesn't need it or want it. The basic principle is it acts as a logging system so perhaps some other technologies could use it. In everyday computing though, almost all programs you use will and does have their own logging/loggers/cache and rarely, if ever call on zeitgeist to do anything. Removing it always saves 15-20 megs of ram and increases performance since a whole bunch of logging isn't being done in the background.

So if those two tweaks are worrisome or troublesome to you in anyway, please feel free to alter, remove, or replace them. The decision was simply made to keep a streamlined, lean and mean full featured system for old putes. Yet all users not only need to know of the changes/tweaks but why it was done and how to make changes if they want.

I will be posting more of the tweaks enabled in LXLE here periodically. See ya soon.