Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps

[Mark <markg85 gmail com>]

// begin note

i posted this in the fedora-list first but wasn't getting reply's that
are discussing what i say below. And for the memory (in the text
below).. Using it all up doesn't mean that it's used good. See it like
your a rich guy. you can spend it all at once or just go easy on it. i
would like to go for the latter one. + send to the gnome desktop devel
list

// end note


Hey,

i was just looking through the system monitor to see how my memory
usage was doing and that gave me a impressive (negative way) result.
I've made a screenshot [1] of it and edited it a little. The color
that i added in mean:

- darkred : extreme memory usage for..?? nothing?
- red : gnome-panel related things (applets mostly)
- orange : first applet UNDER one MB.

Now if you take a look at the image you see that my current gnome
session is taking up:
4.9 MB (gnome-panel)
3.5 MB (mixer_applet2)
3.0 MB (wnck-applet)
2.3 MB (nm-applet)
1.2 MB (notification-area-applet)
1.1 MB (gnome-volume-manager)
0.7 MB (bluetooth-applet)

Totals to: 17.7 MB
That is only the gnome-panel stuff with it's applets. if you are gonna
take into account the stuff that is needed to run the applets (like
python) than it will likely use a lot more but since those a can be
used with other applications as well i will leave that out of it.

Now there are still 3 more left in the list i highlighted.
1. Nautilus
Oke.. this one is bothering me. at the time that i shot the screenshot
nautilus was not open (at least not the file browser) and than it's
taking up that much memory! that's just overkill!

2. gnome-settings-daemon
Why does this need to run? what's the purpose of it? If it's just
running for other programs to grab gnome settings (wild guess) than
it's using up way to much RAM anyway. otherwise it has to go.

3. puplet
Someone said this was efficient in Fedora 8.. doesn't look like it. (8 MB).

Now the notebook i'm typing this on has 1GB om memory and runs Fedora
fine so if i look at it that way than the ram usage is fine. but keep
in mind the people with less memory (256 or 512 MB's) they are gonna
get a hard time with this fedora. My total memory usage at the time of
this writing is: 432.00 MB (with GIMP on.. if that's closed than it's
"just" 400 MB).

What i'm trying to say here is that those gnome-panel applets are
taking up way to much memory regardless of the memory you can afford
or have in your computer. It should just be as fast and small as
possible with all the needed functions. 3.5 MB for the mixer applet
(which doesn't even support pulseaudio streams and is really basic!)
is just overkill (btw it's taking up 4.6 MB now). Perhaps all those
applets need to be checked on memory usage? or a completely new
gnome-panel + applets that just take up a few MB in total (instead of
17.7). Gnome and Fedora are currently looking fine the way they are.
so perhaps it's time to stop spending time on features for a while (2
releases? till Fedora 10?) and start spending all time/money/efforts
on performance  memory usage and usability.

And again for the memory. Having much doesn't need that it needs to
use much! slow pc's with less memory should be able to run fedora
right? Simple example. imagine that a slow 500 MHz pc with 512MB
memory wants to run Fedora + compizfusion + Gimp. Now at this moment
he must drop compiz or gimp. if that panel stuff was just using normal
amounts of memory he would have been able to use all 3 (just a
example!!)

So.. is something gonna change with this memory abuse?

[1] http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6821/screenshotsystemmonitoryh4.png