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Re: `cpan` unusable on small-RAM machines

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Hi there,

Well, somebody cares. :)

On Mon, 13 Nov 2023, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans wrote:

> I have a Raspberry Pi Zero. It has 512MiB of RAM. Hardly small even by
> modern standards. The `cpan` command is basically useless on it.

I agree that half a gig of RAM should be enough to do almost anything
but it seems the world is no longer really interested in efficiency.
I used to serve all the computing needs of a small business with just
a 5MHz 8086 box, with 768kiB of RAM and a 10MB hard disc.  Nowadays,
the initrd wouldn't fit on that disc.

But I'm afraid I can't agree that 512MiB of RAM is 'hardly small' by
modern standards.  If you'd said that it ought to be enough to install
a Perl module I'd agree.  If you'd said that it ought to be enough to
run a browser (after all when I was Compatibility King at Glendon Ave.
back in 2000, we had 32Mbytes of RAM if we were lucky but managed to
run any existing browser) I'd say, "Not any more!  I can't even run a
browser reliably on a 1GiB Pi".  4GiB is *almost* enough.  To avoid
problems, I find 8GiB is better.  At the moment.  We use 512MiB Zeros
here just to run the odd camera.  I think they're a fiver apiece.

Having said that, I can't remember the last time I used cpan.pm to
install anything.  I usually look for a distro package and use that.
I think once you start a cpan shell you're off the beaten track, and
you're supposed to manage all by yourself.

> In more detail: I cannot install anything with the `cpan`. It gets
> OOM-killed.

The OOM killer doesn't kill processes because there isn't enough RAM.
It kills them because there isn't enough *remaining* RAM.  It might or
it might not be cpan's fault that your RAM is full, but wouldn't it be
easier just to tune the OOM killer for the process?  On one of my Pis
I had to do that for - wait for it - the NFS daemon.  I suppose swap
would be too painful.

Maybe this should be mentioned in the docs.

-- 

73,
Ged.

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Thread

`cpan` unusable on small-RAM machines leonerd@leonerd.org.uk ("Paul \"LeoNerd\" Evans") - 2023-11-13 22:14 +0000
  Re: `cpan` unusable on small-RAM machines perl5porters@jubileegroup.co.uk ("G.W. Haywood") - 2023-11-14 12:27 +0000
  Re: `cpan` unusable on small-RAM machines leonerd@leonerd.org.uk ("Paul \"LeoNerd\" Evans") - 2023-11-14 14:17 +0000

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