Minimum Templates Query

General Discussion
1

I’m not 100% sure if this should be in Support or here, but as I don’t have a problem but do have a question, I thought here.

I haven’t dabbled yet in minimum templates, but I will start to soon.

However, I want to outline my challenges and reasons for exploring this, in case I’m going down the wrong route.

I run a lenovo x230. No idea what the processor is (think early i5) but there is 16 gigs of ram and a 240gb ssd.

I have Dom0 constrained to consume a max of 1.5gb ram.
Space isn’t really the issue, as my own work and private files probably comes to less than 20 gigs.

Ram is really where I seem to hit the wall.

I have the normal dom0, sys-usb, sys-net and a vpn qube spun up, all run Fedora (non minimum) and are constrained to 500mbs ram a piece.

I have my research qube which is fedora, and I need to run libreoffice and zotero. This is a network isolated qube, so any browsing is done on a disposable qube.

I’ve also started to play with a debian qube to handle emails, but to do this ‘properly’ it is looking like I’ll need a couple of email related small qubes.

The research qube and internet qube seem to eat ram, so I’m finding the machine is tolerably slow. however, if I wanted to start to add some more qubes, I think I’ll be on the wrong side of slow.

Will minimum qubes help reduce ram consumption? As mentioned, I’m not space constrained but ram constrained.

Apart from ‘buy a better machine’, is there something I should be looking at? Is moving to minimum templates, such as for the sys and email qubes, the right way to go?

2

Yes, less software running = less ram usage and smaller attack surface. Win win.

1 Like
3

I haven’t played with pushing RAM usage down (I have more space), but I regularly see people talk about setting RAM to 400 MB or so for minimal qubes. I personally just set it to 400MB unless its a qube that will run an app, in which case I will give it more, sometimes as much as 4GB. (A browser probably needs that much unless you’re very disciplined about open tabs.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if that 400MB number can be reduced on a case-by-case basis.

Even if it turns out 400MB is as low as one can go, that’s still a significant improvement over 500MB; if you can apply that percentage to everything, it’s like adding 3.2GB to a 16GB system.

As far as minimum templates in general, once one has the expertise to do it, there’s no downside other than the time it takes.

4

I have 15 qubes running at the moment including this browser’s one, not including running GUI updater in parallel, and xentop shows I have 5879860k free more.

5

But how much memory did you start with? He started with 16GB. If you started with 32 this wouldn’t be very encouraging!

6

16GB, sorry. I was like it was notorious fact about me because every awhile I write about it, hahah

1 Like
7

Do you have tight limits on the max ram per qube?

8

Most probably.