Re: Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps

[Rob Taylor <rob taylor codethink co uk>]

jamie wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 14:37 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
>> On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 15:36 +0000, jamie wrote:
>>
>>> Vala of course - http://live.gnome.org/Vala
>> Rewriting every application in another language isn't the answer for
>> resource usage.  Not that Vala is bad, on the contrary it seems nice for
>> some use cases, but in terms of engineering effort it would be far
>> easier to rework various Python applications like deskbar,sealert etc.
>> to run in a single Python process.  
>>
>> And more generally, to have one VM per language type, rather than per
>> app.
>>
> 
> so if one app dies your entire desktop dies too?
> 
> As far as python goes the big culprit is PyGTK AFAICT - it seems to
> contribute a huge amount of bloat
> 
> A better way may be to have the front end of say deskbar in c/c++/vala
> and embed python for the existing plugins (which do not use pygtk
> AFAICT)
> 
> Python works best when its embedded and shows its real utility in apps
> like Epiphany and Rhythmbox but I cant say Im impressed by standalone
> GTK python apps...


Here is the main problem with pygtk's memory usage and startup time (as
I understand it). It's well understood, but requires ABI breakage:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346946

Maybe it can get fixed with pybank ;)

A bigger problem is python's memory usage in general, that seems to be a
lot less well understood. http://bugs.python.org/issue1123430 is
informative.

Thanks,
Rob
-- 
Rob Taylor, Codethink Ltd. -  http://codethink.co.uk