Puppy Studio and RAM issues - anyone noticed?

[Maxei]

Hi guys, I use Puppy Linux 3.3 RT kernel, from a bootable CD, to run applications like Pianoteq. Recently, I had to use Puppy Linux to open a (windows) program with Wine, called GraphPad. It simply works great!...except that when this Graphpad Prism V makes more complicated calculations (such as duplicate a table and its associated graphs and stats), then the use of RAM goes to the roof: all the RAM gets used, and from then on, the system can hang, almost to the point that I have to reboot.

Well, although unrelated to music (it's for my scientific work), I wanted to report this problem. Running in RAM is real fast with other apps (my laptop has dual core 2.2 Ghz, with 4 GB RAM), but if one application like the one I mentioned is pushed to do "big" calculations (I suppose they're big), then it gets very slow, jerky, it is not possible to flush out the RAM. The only solution so far (very impractical) is to stop everything and to reboot again on the cd. I haven't tried GIMP; my works tend to slow down GIMP quite often in Ubuntu 11.04; I'm curious how puppy studio will fare running GIMP in RAM with "big projects".

I hope that developers of Puppy studio take a close look at it.

[autostatic]

I hope that developers of Puppy studio take a close look at it.

Hello Maxei, did you also report this on the Puppy Linux forum or bugtracker? Otherwise the devs will probably never read this. And it could also be a WIne issue so you might want to report it on the Wine site too: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... ngId=40686

[raboof]

all the RAM gets used, and from then on, the system can hang, almost to the point that I have to reboot. (...) but if one application like the one I mentioned is pushed to do "big" calculations (I suppose they're big), then it gets very slow, jerky, it is not possible to flush out the RAM. The only solution so far (very impractical) is to stop everything and to reboot again on the cd.

Is this a Puppy-specific problem though? I'd say any OS gets into trouble when you try to use more memory than you have, and Linux in particular.

I guess a distro ran from CD might load some things into a ramdisk (so you'll hit the problem earlier as you have less RAM for the applications), and you probably don't have a swap partition (so the problem will be more pronounced, although once you start swapping heavily the system will still screech to a halt IME).

[brummer]

As far I know Puppy Studio isn't maintain/develop any more, so don't suspect any fix on that.
Maybe you take a closer look at some mainline Distros like AV Linux and KX Studio, indeed they wouldn't run in RAM as default, but as you notice already by yourself, there is also a disadvantage in loading the hole system into RAM. Sometime you need your RAM for your Projects, to let them run smooth, that could be more imported then a quick start-up time for some apps.

[l0wt3ch]

Hi guys, I use Puppy Linux 3.3 RT kernel, from a bootable CD, to run applications like Pianoteq. Recently, I had to use Puppy Linux to open a (windows) program with Wine, called GraphPad. It simply works great!...except that when this Graphpad Prism V makes more complicated calculations (such as duplicate a table and its associated graphs and stats), then the use of RAM goes to the roof: all the RAM gets used, and from then on, the system can hang, almost to the point that I have to reboot.

Well, although unrelated to music (it's for my scientific work), I wanted to report this problem. Running in RAM is real fast with other apps (my laptop has dual core 2.2 Ghz, with 4 GB RAM), but if one application like the one I mentioned is pushed to do "big" calculations (I suppose they're big), then it gets very slow, jerky, it is not possible to flush out the RAM. The only solution so far (very impractical) is to stop everything and to reboot again on the cd. I haven't tried GIMP; my works tend to slow down GIMP quite often in Ubuntu 11.04; I'm curious how puppy studio will fare running GIMP in RAM with "big projects".

I hope that developers of Puppy studio take a close look at it.

Hello there,

If you like, you could try installing Puppy Studio to hard disk, by choosing "Universal Installer" from the menu, answering the questions, and then running "GRUB Legacy Bootloader Config" (choose "MBR" when asked).

Brummer is right, there is no longer any official support available for Puppy Studio 3.3. But I'm in a good mood this morning, and thought I'd try to be helpful.

[Maxei]

Hi and thanks for the answers.
So, nobody is concerned about RAM issues. Well then fine. Could be as said by someone, the problem might go away if I install puppy in the hard disk instead of playing it from RAM. Well, that is an option which I personally won't take. I have installed Ubuntu Studio in the hard disk; it's less responsive than Puppy Linux 3.3, but I can do serious work (I mean, my job's work, not only my music amateurish work).

But the thing is, I am truly amazed by Puppy Linux, small size, fast as nothing else I have tested before, except of course the RAM issue which I report here. I imagine a distro that could run in CPU/GPU/RAM triple mode, switching and using resources as needed, to optimize the tasks, and improved rapidity. I may ignore things on how Linux kernel use the resources as of late, right, tight?

Please feel free to comment on this topics, perhaps there are still ways to improve the function of a bootable "live" micro OS like puppy linux. Performance is a must nowdays.

Thanks to all.

[l0wt3ch]

Well dude, the software is obviously designed for audio production. Sorry if some obscure Windows app is using up your ram.

You're right about the advantages that you mention. And it's nice that you don't have to install it, isn't it?

But if you don't care enough about your problem to partition your drive, or whatever, it's pretty silly of you to expect "the developers" to fix it for you.

Enjoy Puppy Studio 3.3-rt.

[Capoeira]

I use "anything sync daemon" in Arch wich alows you to load to RAM anything you like on boot.
There seams to be something similar for debian based distros: https://github.com/wor/goanysync