Tails

#1 Updated by intrigeri 2015-08-06 08:00:16

all tests that start Tor Launcher: either it never appears on the screen, or checking for upgrades
fails because lack of memory. In the latter case:

.xsession-errors reads: Only 81340 MemFree, while 128000 is needed.
And another one (obfs3): Only 125204 MemFree, while 128000 is needed.

I suspect that the new Tor Browser being bigger eats more buffer/cache, even after having exited. Bumping the memory allocated to the VM by 200000 KiB (!) fixes that.

After Tor Launcher has exited I see:

                   total      used       free     shared     buffers     cached
     Mem:          1252       1163         89          0        206        665
     -/+ buffers/cache:        291        961

… which seems to confirm my guess about buffer/cache.

While on 1.4.1:

                   total      used       free     shared    buffers     cached
      Mem:         1252        981        270          0        130        571
      -/+ buffers/cache:       279        973

Also, note that (1.5~rc1): tmpfs 627M 26M 601M 5% /lib/live/mount/overlay
… so not much memory is eaten by the read-write branch of the /’s mount.

1.5~rc1, no bridges, immediately after “Tor is ready” + Vidalia icon has appeared:

                total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
   Mem:          1242        935        306          0        112        493
   -/+ buffers/cache:        330        911

1.4.1, no bridges, immediately after “Tor is ready” + Vidalia icon has appeared:

                total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
   Mem:          1242        888        353          0        107        481
   -/+ buffers/cache:        299        942

Same on 1.5~rc1, without AppArmor:

                total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
   Mem:          1242        935        306          0        112        490
   -/+ buffers/cache:        333        908

   Same on 1.4.1, without AppArmor:
                total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
   Mem:          1242        914        327          0        106        477
   -/+ buffers/cache:        330        912

And:

• rsyslog in 1.5~rc1: root 3125 0.0 0.1 29476 2500 ? Ssl 14:38 0:00 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd
• rsyslog in 1.4.1: root 3416 0.0 0.1 27724 2500 ? Sl 14:32 0:00 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -c5

=> it seems that something else than Tor Launcher (not AppArmor, apparently; looking at the packages diff, only rsyslog seems to be a valid candidate; I compared the output of ‘top’ and could not spot anything that would clearly explain the difference, could it be that some security fixes e.g. in the kernel account for it?) already eats more RAM in 1.5~rc1, and in addition Tor Launcher eat much more buffers+cache.

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2015-08-06 08:01:49

Unless someone finds a way to get memory needs down (I’m giving up at this point after the research pasted above) I think we should bump the documented memory requirements to 1.5GB, or even 2GB, and mention this change on the known issues section in the 1.5 release notes. It’s likely that we’ll have to do that when migrating to Jessie anyway.

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2015-08-06 08:06:22

Note that the 1GB requirement was added 4 years ago. I personally vote for bumping it 2GB.

#5 Updated by kytv 2015-08-06 08:19:15

intrigeri wrote:
> Note that the 1GB requirement was added 4 years ago. I personally vote for bumping it 2GB.

This is fine. Unless I’m mistaken most desktop Linuxes recommend 2GB so Tails recommending this is absolutely acceptable.

As long as this is just a “recommendation”, +1