Ubuntu 22.10 Optimizing OpenSSH Server Memory Use, Other RAM Optimizations Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 22.10 Optimizing OpenSSH Server Memory Use, Other RAM Optimizations Coming

As part of a broader effort to reduce system memory use on Ubuntu Linux particularly for server and container/cloud use-cases, Ubuntu 22.10's OpenSSH server has switched to using socket-based activation...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-22.10-SSHD-Socket-Based

[Ermine]

Superservers exist since 1980s. Still innovation in 2022.

[Vistaus]

Ubuntu optimizing stuff? Am I reading this right? Let the flamewar begin.

(I mean: there's always the two camps of people wanting Ubuntu to be more optimized and people who fear it might impact stability.)

[skeevy420]

While I think this is a good idea and am surprised more things don't do that, I can't help but at the first sentence in this paragraph:

At Canonical we care about making Ubuntu as efficient as possible on your hardware and in the cloud, which is why this change has been landed as part of a larger effort to reduce the default memory footprint of our images. A default Ubuntu 22.04 LXD image at release time used 65MiB of RAM, which in kinetic now uses 58MiB after this OpenSSH change; and more improvements are in progress, with the intention of backporting the safer changes to our Ubuntu 22.04 images to improve memory usage for the greatest number of users.

That's some strong Kool-Aid.

Try not to use any more ram on your way across the parking lot.

[ssokolow]

Superservers exist since 1980s. Still innovation in 2022.

It's not the existence of superservers that's the innovation, but actually using them... sort of like how, despite systemd having great support for service sandboxing, and my own creation managing to achieve a 0.4 exposure score in systemd-analyze security, practically everything else is abysmal.

[kylew77]

free -h reports that my Cent7 VMS runs with 40M used sometimes it is lower in the 30s.
Mem: 1.0G 40M 785M 424K 198M 983M

By that standard Ubuntu 22.10 is abysmal!
I have apache running serving a TLS plain text website and sshd.

[tunnelblick]

I'd like to see how much memory they can save when they disable snapd.

[Ermine]

It's not the existence of superservers that's the innovation, but actually using them... sort of like how, despite systemd having great support for service sandboxing, and my own creation managing to achieve a 0.4 exposure score in systemd-analyze security, practically everything else is abysmal.

If using superservers is an innovation in 2022, it is dissappointing too.

[GreenReaper]

Meanwhile my server never stops getting hammered with SSH brute force requests to root that will never succeed - OK, so I know this is a container thing, just amused at the idea of 'saving' memory that'll instantly be allocated by bots before I can login myself.

[mb_q]

It's not the existence of superservers that's the innovation, but actually using them... sort of like how, despite systemd having great support for service sandboxing, and my own creation managing to achieve a 0.4 exposure score in systemd-analyze security, practically everything else is abysmal.

This score is mostly useless and dangerously confusing, like you can have a perfectly scored, fully sandboxed random python webapp with a trivial bug exposing critical information it carries, and on the other hand bad scores for quite heavily tested and audited program like OpenSSH which cannot be sandboxed externally without hindering its main function.