kubuntu-minimal

[metricus]

As far as I know swap increases RAM size to the expense of CPU and disk activity. It's a relic from the old Win 3.1 times when we had something like 64 KiB Ram.
Logically, if the CPU swaps it has to "think" what to swap, when and how much. If you set swappiness to zero you tell it to not bother and focus on what's at hand.
It certainly depends on each configuration. On a machine with 500 or 1 GiB i noticed that the CPU tries to save some Ram and swaps. I also see the disk activity.
At High Ram sizes maybe it doesn't bother anymore. IDK.
But then I ask: why do you bother configuring swap? At 8GiB you can easily run all your programs in Ram and still have spare space.
Like I said: try and if you see improvements fine, otherwise, revert. All you do is to set swappiness to zero and see what happens. if you like it, next time you partition you can forget swap.

One thing I can tell for sure: on my 2 netbooks it makes a difference. If I let swap on, the disk is busy all the time and the machine is sluggish. same on my HP laptop with 2GiB Ram.
Since the posting was about minimal Kubuntu for lower configurations I thought I'd make the recommendation. For super-duper machines you surely don't need minmal kubuntu.

[bsniadajewski]

As far as I know swap increases RAM size to the expense of CPU and disk activity. It's a relic from the old Win 3.1 times when we had something like 64 KiB Ram.
Logically, if the CPU swaps it has to "think" what to swap, when and how much. If you set swappiness to zero you tell it to not bother and focus on what's at hand.
It certainly depends on each configuration. On a machine with 500 or 1 GiB i noticed that the CPU tries to save some Ram and swaps. I also see the disk activity.
At High Ram sizes maybe it doesn't bother anymore. IDK.
But then I ask: why do you bother configuring swap? At 8GiB you can easily run all your programs in Ram and still have spare space.
Like I said: try and if you see improvements fine, otherwise, revert. All you do is to set swappiness to zero and see what happens. if you like it, next time you partition you can forget swap.

One thing I can tell for sure: on my 2 netbooks it makes a difference. If I let swap on, the disk is busy all the time and the machine is sluggish. same on my HP laptop with 2GiB Ram.
Since the posting was about minimal Kubuntu for lower configurations I thought I'd make the recommendation. For super-duper machines you surely don't need minmal kubuntu.

True that it may not be needed, but it's still a good starting point for a good custom installation, even on a monster machine.

[SteveRiley]

As far as I know swap increases RAM size to the expense of CPU and disk activity...

Yep, I understand how swap works and what it's for. As to why I have a swap partition on a machine with 8 GiB, I use it only for hibernation. The partition never sees activity during normal use, even though I haven't changed the default value of vm.swappiness. I suppose I was asking if you were thinking that the mere presence of the partition somehow affects performance.

For super-duper machines you surely don't need minmal kubuntu.

I prefer hand-crafted builds because I like to have greater control over what's installed. I'm not necessarily striving for minimalism, although that tends to be a side-effect of my approach.

[metricus]

I suppose I was asking if you were thinking that the mere presence of the partition somehow affects performance.

I couldn't imply that. However, I do think that the CPU will still be busy analyzing if he needs or not to swap so you still loose some cpu power. On a muscle machine that may not be noticeable though.

Another matter is to see how you measure if it swaps or not. Ksysguard tells me I'm not swapping either but the disk led blinks quite a lot more when I have the swappiness on and the machine is slower.

Another observation is that with swappiness the desktop comes on but the disk is still working and if I click on Chromium for example, it takes abnormal time for it to come up.
Without swapiness this doesn't happen. My wild interpretation here is that after boot the CPU immediately starts saving things on disk and this causes this sluggishness while without it it just stops "thinking" after the desktop is up and is ready for a new command.

One thing is sure: My eeePC would not work at all with stock kubuntu because of it's 4GiB SSD. My ACER netbook with 16 GiB SSD can take a stock install but you feel like smashing it against the wall. Once I make these tweaks (at the very least: swappiness off, akonadi off, nepmuk off, effects off.) it becomes a lovely machine.
And believe it or not, the eeePC behaves a lot better than the acer although if you look at the specs you would guess otherwise.

I am attaching a snapshot of ksysguard on my laptop with Hulu-Desktop running a movie (flash), rekonq, sylpheed, and Ksnapshot on. As you can see I am merely using 500 KiB RAM. Other than hybernation which I never use (I do use sleep) I see no point in bothering with swap. That's my 2cents.