Re: Nautilus, galeon and evolution taking huge amount of memory...

[Loban Rahman <loban earthling net>]

> So there is somethig absolutely wrong with ps or gtop. Because that's
> what it does. Now if you compare nautilus to explorer from gtop you have
> the feeling that Nautilus is 100 times bigger than explorer. Is that the
> message we want to send: Linux takes more memory than its windows
> counterpart...

Frank, you need to do a little bit of reading on how linux handles
processes and threads, and how top displays them. Like someone said
earlier, each of those instances of nautilus that you saw in top are
threads and so, are sharing that memory. You can't just add them all
together. Unfortunately, GTop does just that in it's summary graph,
which I must admit is rather brain-dead of it.

And you must be the umpteenth person to bring this up because of GTop's
summary graph. I suggest the GTop maintainers should to either disable
that summary, or post a BIG message on that screen warning users that
the results shown are in no way accurate because of this thread and
shared memory issue.

> BTW, how come my swap is full too?

Linux, like most modern OS's, does aggressive caching of the filesystem
and other things. So more often than not, no matter how much memory you
have, it will almost always be "full" after some amount of time. The
swap will also be used extensively to page out sleeping processes and
cache items, although maxing out the swap isn't that common.