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.
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.