From the linked article "It contains 32MB SDRAM" which would have been pretty awesome in 1994 or so. In other words you could do what I did with linux in '94, which was quite a bit.
Unfortunately given what I do with linux in '14 I checked and per ps on one box and the VSZ of /usr/sbin/sshd is 43792K aka about 44 megs, so you'd be about 12 megs into the swap just to log in. Not that vanilla sshd is the lightest memory process out there.
Of course people did run Beowulf clusters before 2014, you'll have to run some 90s era software given 90s era specs.
I don't get it; VSZ is just the virtual memory, i.e., address space, not actually used space (at least, not in Linux). You shouldn't need any swap for it.
My laptop doesn't have swap and only has 2GB of RAM, but it has no problem "allocating" the 3GB+ of virtual memory that the processes are using.
Fair enough, but the general point of mere utility processes consuming all of the available resources leaving nothing to the overall app remains an issue.
I looked for a "big" RSS/RSZ and found my puppet using 53 megs. On a 6 gig machine thats not a big deal, and the elimination of "by hand" administration makes it a fair trade, but on a 32 meg machine that 53 megs would be an issue.
OpenWRT has been running quite successfully on that class of devices for some time now. Sure it is using busybox, some lightweight libc, dropbear instead of openssh for ssh etc, but in the end there is still some RAM left for applications.
Unfortunately given what I do with linux in '14 I checked and per ps on one box and the VSZ of /usr/sbin/sshd is 43792K aka about 44 megs, so you'd be about 12 megs into the swap just to log in. Not that vanilla sshd is the lightest memory process out there.
Of course people did run Beowulf clusters before 2014, you'll have to run some 90s era software given 90s era specs.