It appears, that Amarok eats quite a bit of resources during a long runtime.

At work I’m using a Intel P4 2.8Ghz system with 1 Gb of memory. The system is running Gentoo Linux and goes without reboots for longer periods of time. The system is usually rebooted, when I compiled and installed a new kernel. At the end of the day I hibernate the system and let it wake the next morning by setting an alarm in /proc/acpi/alarm.

Yesterday I nearly reached the point were my complete virtual and physical memory was exhausted and these were the processes, that ate most of the memory (very rough numbers):

• Eclipse 3.3 with lost of plugins installed. Virtual memory was somewhere in the 800Mb region and resident memory at about 280Mb.
• Firefox 2.0.11. Virtual memory was at 520Mb and resident memory at about 250Mb.
• Amarok 1.4.8. Virtual memory allocated: 1.2Gb. Resident memory somewhere between 200 and 300Mb.

And with the rest of processes required to make a usable system I was at nearly 100% memory utilisation. Why in the world would an audio player use 1.2Gb of virtual memory?

So, for the time being until I’m done with my Eclipse work I’ve switched to Audacious. Audacious is happy with about 120Mb virtual and 37Mb resident memory.

After about three weeks of assembly, installing and testing I’ve switched to the new system last weekend. It took a couple of evenings to mirror the Gentoo installation from the old system to the new one. I decided to move from ordinary 32bit Linux to 64bit and with Gentoo this means a complete recompilation.

I like to share my experiences in some forthcoming posts. It was not completely smooth sailing. For the moment here are some random shots from the two system during the assembly.

It actually took me only about 7 months to get my act together. I wrote on May 17th, 2007, that I’m in the market for a new PC. The great procrastinator, that I am, I placed the order with two online dealers in the middle of December. In the morning of Dec 24th, 2007 the last parts arrived.

What was originally planed to be only 1 PC actually became 2. My son also expressed interest in a new PC as a Christmas present. Actually this would be a pretty big Christmas present, so we need to work something out to make the relation correct. Anyway, I followed the schemes outlined in the German computer magazine c’t issues 26/06 and 25/07.

This is the list, what I actually ordered:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R
• Disk: Samsung HD501LJ (500GB)
• DVD reader/writer: NEC 7191S
• Powersupply: Seasonic S12II-380
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750/E6550 (The faster one for me )
• Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 (for my son)
• Graphics card: Gigabyte NX86T256H (Nvidia 8600GT) (for me)
• Case: Coolermaster Centurion 5
• plus the required assortment of accessories like fans, etc.

As for operating systems, my son will continue to run Windows XP. With the HD 3850 card there is still the option to move to Vista some time later. I personally think about moving from 32bit Linux to 64bit. I’ve skimmed the Gentoo forums and from what I read, this shouldn’t cause any problems for the set of applications, that I’m running.

Today I started with the assembly of the two systems and I already found the first thing, that I should have done differently. I guess I should report my progress here, so more to come in the next couple of days.