How much RAM/HDD is enough?

2008-10-01T16:51:00+02:00

During recent discussions we got into common developer problem — there is no such thing as enough disk space… Later it also expanded to RAM size.

My current desktop machine has 4GiB of memory and two hard disks with 820GB (763GiB real) of total capacity. And I have only 90GiB of free space on them. So what took most of space? Usual suspects: Poky and OpenEmbedded builds (du -hs took one hour with “160GiB used” result).

Which get us back to the subject — how much disk space is enough today for development? It depends on area — some people will be fine with less then 100GB, some not. Laptop which I will soon send back to Intel has only 80GB hdd and this is really not enough for me for Poky development (if it has to be the only machine). I know that few persons started to look for 320GB (or larger) disks for their laptops ;D

OK, with “rm_work” class I was able to do Poky builds with few gigabytes of free space. But small hard drive forced me to forget about using VirtualBox for testing in other distributions then Debian ‘sid’ (which I use on all machines). Currently ~/.Virtualbox on my desktop uses about 70GiB as I have there Fedora 8, Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and few other distributions which I use for testing does Poky works under them.

Other thing is doing strange builds… In past I did lot of them — record one took 270GiB of space (and two weeks of building). And I do not like to be space limited when doing them (“rm_work” is not always good way). I still plan to make such big ones from time to time as they allow to check does everything works (and also show new bugs to fix).

But how much RAM is enough? My previous desktop had 2.1GiB RAM, laptop which I use for x86 builds has only 1GiB. Current desktop has 4GiB of DDR2 (low price made it affordable) and for OpenEmbedded or Poky builds it is more then enough (as no one use BitBake from times when 512MiB ram was not enough to just parse metadata). My machine usually maxx at 2.5-3GiB of used memory during heavy builds. When it will be not enough… I still have 2 slots for RAM free :)

How it is for other people?

Where does my disk space go?

2008-03-06T15:10:00+01:00

I have nearly 400 gigabytes storage in my desktop. Some people will tell that this is a lot, some that it is quite small size. But everybody agrees with one simple rule: “there is no such thing as big enough storage”.

From time to time I have situation when I lack space for my projects (which can take 17GB in one run). In such moments there is one solution handy: removing not needed data. But how to check what takes most of space?

Some time ago I discovered ncdu application. It offers simple interface with all required informations — list of directories with space used (all sorted by size). User can walk through directory structure, remove not needed ones, recalculate directory use — everything what is needed in such tool.

Few minutes later 40GB from old builds recovered ;)

Marcin Juszkiewicz - disk

How much RAM/HDD is enough?

Where does my disk space go?