# Arch or FreeBSD which is the best in ram consumption?



## archerpk (Oct 3, 2018)

Hi , i'am not speak english , i'ts not my language , so sorry by mistakes in english.

The title of this topic is my question , i'am a user of arch and that system Rolling Realese is awesome to keep the ram on 400MB~ using i3wm with chromium and others applications.

I'm testing the FreeBSD on a VM using The windows 10 of my brother and the consumption of the ram is incrible. Such as 200 ~ 300MB.

Is the FreeBSD a best choice to keep the ram on performance?


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## shepper (Oct 3, 2018)

Memory use is a function of the Applications, WM/DE and system services (daemons) running in the background.  In Debian, system services are managed by systemd.  In Debian, services are automatically enabled on software installation.

Most of the ArchLinux wikis describe how to enable systemd services manually - an example is the Arch cups wiki.

Similiar to Arch, FreeBSD has you manually enable services like dbus, display managers, printing services and avahi by making entries in /etc/rc.conf.  See the FreeBSD handbook on Xorg/Display managers for an example.  I believe you can find articles about how to fine tune systemd services to save memory in some of the more bloated distributions.


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## archerpk (Oct 3, 2018)

Thanks for the answer, I've been learning about daemons since last week and I'm testing the performance of both arch and freebsd. the two are super efficient.


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## ShelLuser (Oct 3, 2018)

What good is memory if it isn't being used? That's why FreeBSD (and other operating systems alike) tend to use plenty of it. If not for the applications running on the OS then it'll be used for caching purposes.

Don't worry about free memory. Instead focus on the things you actually want to run or do with the OS.


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## SirDice (Oct 3, 2018)

ShelLuser said:


> What good is memory if it isn't being used?


Exactly. As the age old mantra says, unused memory is useless memory.


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## graudeejs (Oct 4, 2018)

I've been using ArchLinux (I got new PC and I really want OpenCL with my AMD video card) for the past 7 months.
I was so shocked that on Arch I get memory usage below 4GB (who on earth I bought 16GB RAM. I know - I was hoping to use ZFS).

Off-topic:
Linux experience isn't all that great really. While steam works very well, this peace of *nix freezes every now and then. I had to reboot my PC more times in past 7 months that in past 5 years with FreeBSD.


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## recluce (Oct 6, 2018)

If you want Arch, consider Artix, which is Arch without systemd (instead you can choose between OpenRC, runit or S6 for your init system). But if FreeBSD runs the applications you want, it would be my first choice (stability, documentation etc).


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