[PlanetCCRMA] fedora machine load

[Peter Lutek]

greetings!

a while ago, i switched from ccrma/fc2 to gentoo on my laptop, because of  
the richer available repository of non-audio packages, and also the  
ability to better customize the environment to a given set of hardware. i  
am currently considering re-examining ccrma (on fc3), because i want to  
spend more time making music, and less time doing sys admin.

i still have my ccrma/fc2 hard drive, and have recently compared it to my  
gentoo install, which is on a separate drive. here are some observations  
(both with nothing running except the ion3 window manager and top):

ccrma/fc2: 62 processes, 218 Mb RAM used
gentoo: 40 processes, 54 Mb RAM used

yes, i realize this is a simplistic comparison, but i have to think twice  
about moving back to a system which uses almost 1/4 of my available RAM  
when it is IDLE (i have 1Gb RAM in this machine).

so, questions:
is fc3 better in this respect than fc2?
do any of you have an fc3 installation with an IDLE load as low as my  
gentoo system?

i need to be able to push this machine pretty hard -- ardour recording and  
then mixing 18 tracks AT ONCE. i can do this on the gentoo system.

thoughts?

thanks very much in advance!

-p