How Do You Keep Resource Usage Low?

@MagusZ there are a lot of ways to reduce the number of packages and services running, but in the end you’d want to think about the reasons why you’d want to do so.

If it’s ambition to see how sleek you can make the system, that’s a geeky goal I can understand. It’s an honorable tinkerer’s mission :slight_smile: But if you are not genuinely worried about the OS eating away resources, or are satisfied with the performance, I’d say there shouldn’t be too much worry. RAM usage stays higher after some time, but that is mostly the cached memory. If you don’t run out of RAM, a restart is not necessarily a good idea.

Check out this old thread regarding this topic. There are many views, mine included, that if you have the drive space to spare, 100-200 packages worth 1-2GB is not the end of the world and it wont affect performance, while providing useful tools you might need:

The low specced 4GB RAM, Pentium N3700 machine, should be golden provided you don’t open Chrome or Firefox :slight_smile: Those are the real resource eaters. But not of their own fault.
I develop websites for a living and I can tell you the libraries that go into building a site nowadays are so complex and bloated that a website (think reddit, facebook) can easily gulp 1-2GB of RAM by itself.

On a 6-core/12-thread CPU, 32GB RAM machine reddit still freezes after scrolling for a few hours.

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