Re: GNOME2's High Memory usage

[Chris Chabot <chabotc reviewboard com>]

Sander Vesik wrote:

> On 26 Feb 2002, Frank Belew wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2002-02-26 at 08:59, Chris Chabot wrote:
> >
> > > A while back some people were discussing memory usage of gnome 2 
> > > applications on this list. Now that i have a 'stable' gnome2 platform 
> > > running again, i'd like to chip in with my results.. My conslusion would 
> > > be that memory usage does seem awefully high, even considering the 
> > > amount of debug info still in the binaries.
> > >
> > > Below, a ps aux sniplet, when running a fresh 'gnome-session'. Notice 
> > > the 22megs for nautilus, and 12 .. 14 megs for applets (even with 6 or 7 
> > > megs shared, is still a _lot_ of memory for an applet in a panel). The 
> > > panel it self also has similar memory usage..  All this makes me very 
> > > happy that i have 1 gig of ram, but wurried for people who do not ;-)
> > If people are going to start looking at memory usage, they need to give
> > a perspective.
> >
> > Examples of problems:
> > x86 vs PPC vs Sparc architectures, memory values will skew greatly
> >
> > Compiler options, different optimizations will add speed and sacrifice
> > memory
>
> I guess the pango backend in use can also make a difference...
I'm sorry your quite right.

Platform: X86 Redhat 7.2, glibc 2.2 (.4), XFree 4.2.0, Freetype 2.0.6, 
latest pre-gnome2/sources packages (non striped binaries and libraries).

Compiler options: C/CXX flags: -O2 -march=i686

Memory usage was gotten from 'ps aux', which lists virtual size (maped 
memory regions) and Resident memory. This does not include 'shared', 
which for instance 'top' (or gnome-system-monitor ;-) can tell you about.

Examples:
nautilus ps aux usage: (VSZ) 27876 (RSS) 14712
nautilus top usage: (Size) 14760  (RSS) 14M  (Shared) 9560


All in all is the 'total memory used' by nautilus not extremely high. 
(resident - shared = 5 megs real mem eaten), however, the large amount 
of shared memory combined with the decent amount of memory smaller apps 
ealy eat is what worries me.

Shared libraries (for session with panel, some applets, and nautilus) 
eats up around 25 megs of memory, Nautilus 5 megs, panel 2.5 megs, and 
each applet 1.5 megs.

This means on a 'default' session, gnome2 eats around (25 + 5 + 2.5 + 
(3x1.5) 4.5) 37 megs of memory.

Ofcource a large part of this seems to be in the amount of libraries 
loaded and the memory they use.

And ofcource all this memory usage, is without doing anything usefull 
yet, but just an idle desktop ;-)

   -- Chris