Social Networking with an Ancient Laptop

For the purpose of this article, I used a Micron Transport ZX with 256 MiB of memory with a 600 Mhz Pentium III processor. The version of Linux is XUbuntu 9.10. After booting, the system had 4,076 KiB of free memory, with another 141,788 KiB of free buffers/cache available, and now swap used. Gwibber, Firefox, and Google Chrome constitute the software used to access Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Gwibber

In a previous post, I discussed Gwibber as a product. It works just fine on Ubuntu. Gwibber actually consists of two Python programs. The Gwibber-daemon collects the information from the social networks, and Gwibber displays the information. After running for an hour, the daemon occupied 31,552 KiB of memory, while the display occupied 12,744 KiB. The result was that swap from zero to 13,568 KiB.

Gwibber allows you to reply to tweets, retweet, and reply to status message. It does not have a mechanism for originating tweets or status messages. To update multiple social networks at one time, you could use Ping.fm.  Since there is no stand-alone Linux application, we need to use a browser to access their Web site. This is where we can push the machine over the hill into heavy swapping.

Firefox

Firefox is not a lightweight browser. Ping.fm is a very simple Web site, but Firefox still required 71,256 KiB of actual memory. With Gwibber run, the swap usage jumped to 114,984 KiB. You will need to occassionally go to the actual Web site for the social network. Logging into Facebook bumped the memory usage up to 78,480 KiB. I suspect it would go higher, but Firefox won’t display the right column. Switching to Facebook Live Feed drove the memory usage t0 81,152 KiB. The kernel starts stealing more space from buffers and caches.

With only 256 MiB of memory, using the Loono (uses Adobe Flash)  extension to Firefox, instead of Gwibber is out of the question. In fact, any site that uses Adobe Flash is going to put a serious strain on resources.

Google Chrome

Although it is not available from the Ubuntu repository, you can download Google Chrome from Google’s site. With Gwibber running, the 17,532 KiB real memory requirement of Chrome shows. The swap space used was 14,676 KiB. This data was from visiting Ping.fm.  When visiting Facebook, the memory usage jumped to 31,624 KiB, with swap usage increasing to 29,488 KiB.

If you do not want to use Gwibber, there is the Brizzly extension to the Chrome browser. It does not dynamically update streams, and keep each steam in a separate tab. Other than being slight more inconvienient, it is an alternative to Gwibber.

Conclusion

Gwibber with the Google Chrome browser present a good solution to systems with limited memory. Firefox has a much larger memory footprint, but it does work. For me, Brizzly just does not meet my needs for a dynamic single stream. I did not try applications such TweetDeck or Seesmic, as they both use Adobe Air. The memory resource requirements for this applications are such that they barely run in a 512 MiB system.