[mythtv-users] Will moving to DDR-400memory from DDR-333 improve performance?

[Leighton Brough]

Matthew McClement wrote:
> As for Myth and its memory usage, you can get a MythTV combined FE/BE to
> use under 200MB of RAM(including MySQL), but it requires far more effort
> than the price of a 512MB stick of RAM. You basically have to strip
> everything down to the bare minimum, compile everything that you can
> with -0s and appropriate -march, *no* other exotic compile flags, strip
> libraries to only include exactly what you need, tune MySQL so that it
> practically only consumes enough memory to hold the executable, use the
> smallest theme and make sure you disable all the memory hungry drawing
> methods in Myth.
>
> I suspect with even more effort you could probably get it near the 100MB
> mark if you used uClibc, busybox, dropped the WM, stripped X down
> further than I bothered and reduced Myth down to it's most basic DVR
> functions.
>
> Or you could just go and buy a stick of RAM.
>   
Another data-point for the discussion and for those sizing their boxes 
in the future: I've got a box pretty similar to the original poster 
(FE+BE, 6200, P4 3.0GHz), with 3 HD tuners. I'm running a pretty 
stripped back configuration: pretty much everything is a module in the 
kernel, I'm only loading the daemons that are absolutely necessary, a 
light window manager etc, albeit on X. I originally put 2x256MB sticks 
of RAM in the two slots in this system. It was a totally false economy.

With 512MB swap for a total of 1GB of VM, it was very inclined to 
thrash. If I was recording 3 shows, commercial flagging them, and 
attempting to watch another, I would often get process failures due to 
running out of memory. The working data set in this case for me is 
around 1GB. I've now got 2GB of RAM installed, and that definitely gives 
me some headroom, as well as never touching the swap with "swappiness"  
set to 0. So now my 2x256MB sticks are on the shelf.

Leighton