On tiny servers

The cheap VPS that is circumlunar.space has 128MB of RAM. I'm not

exactly happy with calling that "tiny" (it doesn't seem like that

long ago that I happily subisted on a quarter of that much), but by

modern standards it is. Of course, it is mostly just running

Gophernicus so it doesn't exactly need buckets of memory, but it is

also functioning as a tiny public access system for people I trust.

Slugmax and yargo have accounts, and I am thrilled to have such

long- and up-standing members of SDF as my first users.

We haven't all three of us been logged in simultaneously yet, but

it could happen, and if it did that would correspond to about 40MB

each if we were being fair, which pretty quickly has each

individual back in "oh, okay, that's kind of small" territory.

However, I am really enjoying paying close attention to how much

memory the programs I use consume, and searching for lighter

alternatives. It's a small thing, but it's made simple, everyday

activities just a little more interesting and fun.

I have set the default login shell to mksh instead of bash, as it

is supposed to be a little lighter. I am using elvis-tiny in

place of vim, and it hasn't been too bad so far, although I miss

being able to Crl-Z my editor. I've not yet been able to get elvis

to wrap text at 80 chars. I originally planned to just write very

long lines and feed the result to fold afterward, but had to

abandon that when a long paragraph in a phlog post caused a

segmentation fault! Slugmax is using something called mg (which

I hadn't heard of before) as an alternative to emacs (which wants

a whopping 130 MB!). Yargo has upstaged us both by setting his

shell to dash and using ed (you know, the standard editor).

It's interesting to question some of my habits. On SDF, I tend to

leave a tmux session running constantly, with mutt open in one

pane. Is this really necessary? Is it so hard to open up mutt

each time I log in? It's not at all like IRC where you miss out on

stuff by doing that. Speaking of IRC, I set it up a local-only

server and was surprised to note that the server daemon (ngircd),

with just me connected, takes up about 4MB while the irssi client

takes up 12MB! That seems backward, so I may have to hunt for a

slimmer client.

Of course, adding enough swap would make some of this a non-issue,

as mail clients and tmux shells etc. would just be moved to the

disk when people logged off, but we're not exactly drowning in disk

space, either, and besides, there's a charm in trying to strugle

by, at least if you're the right kind of crazy.

Hit me up with a public key if this sounds like your kind of place.