RE: Memory footprint of BEAGLE

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2006-10-09 at 13:15 -0400, Gregoire Gentil wrote:
> The memory foot print of Beagle on my system is 26MB. It's very high for
> the embeded system which I'm developing and which is low in memory
> (256MB). Is there any tip to reduce the memory footprint. Many thanks by
> advance,

The only real way to limit the memory use without hacking the software
is to reduce the number of backends to the absolute minimum.  You can do
this with the --backend option to beagled.  I'd recommend disabling any
ones you know you're not going to use.  Mail backends, particularly
Thunderbird, are pretty memory hungry.

Beyond that, we know that the memory usage is too high for many users
with lower-memory systems.  We're looking to address the problem in a
few different ways, but some of them are pretty substantial and take
time to implement.  If you're interested in helping by hacking on the
problem, we'd be very appreciative.

> PS: To calculate, I did on an already-indexed machine, beagled // sleep
> 20 // free -m // get used memory // beagle-shutdown // free -m // get
> used memory"

A better method is to add up the dirty writable memory from a pmap of
the beagled process, like so:

        count=0; beaglepid=`pidof beagled`; for i in `pmap $beaglepid |
        grep r[w-][x-]p | grep anon | awk '{print $3}' | sed 's/K$//g'`;
        do count=$(($count+$i)); done; echo $count
        
That will tell you the real memory used by beagle better than "ps aux"
or "free".

Joe