RE: Goals for 2.10 - desktop-wide profiling

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 19:25 +0200, Kjartan Maraas wrote:
> tir, 21,.09.2004 kl. 19.10 -0700, skrev Eugenia Loli-Queru:
> > > Now that 2.8 is out, it's time to set off for 2.10 goals. One of the
> > > issues I'd particularly like to see addressed is current GNOME's
> > > unfriendliness towards low-mem setups[1]. There are still very common[2]
> > > machines with 128MB or 64MB of RAM, especially in corporate
> > > environments. It's a shame they cannot be used to host GNOME,
> > 
> So, maybe it's time to force everyone to boot with mem=128M and live
> with it for a couple of weeks? :)
> 
> > I am with you on this one Maciej. Currently, Gnome is marginally usable on 
> > 128 MBs for basic tasks (if you have to have OOo, web browser or Evolution 
> > open it is not usable). I know first hand, one of my machines had 128 MBs of 
> > RAM and it was /just/ loadable, while Fedora really needs 192+ MBs, even if 
> > at this time XP still requires 128 MB and Win98 64 MB (sure, Fedora is newer 
> > than these OSes, but that doesn't mean that they don't still compete in the 
> > corporate space).
> > 
> Yeah, most large companies spend years getting rid of old stuff. I know
> we've still got Windows 9x and NT4 machines in abundance.
> 
> > And some GTK+ speed profiling wouldn't hurt either. Gnome-applets are using 
> > lots of memory too. All these issues are very common discussed on forums by 
> > gnome users, I think it's time the gnome core devs to listen and be 
> > realistic about it and start profiling.
> > 
> I fired up valgrind using the heap profiling tool there just to get a
> birds eye view on where allocations happen and it seems font handling
> and icon themes are the major offenders there. There was some talk about
> making icon theme formats better by using some packing technique or
> something but I don't know if anything materialized.
> 
> Output from massif is attached, though it's just from opening and
> closing gnome-calculator...

When using massif with gnome, use something like:
--alloc-fn=g_malloc --alloc-fn=g_realloc --alloc-fn=g_try_malloc --alloc-fn=g_malloc0 --alloc-fn=g_mem_chunk_alloc

to get more useful graphs.

Also, gnome apps have deep backtraces, so use at least --depth=5.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a suave alcoholic inventor looking for a cure to the poison coursing 
through his veins. She's a blind wisecracking magician's assistant trying to 
make a difference in a man's world. They fight crime!