Can anything be done to reduce memory usage?

[Kevin Cowtan <cowtan yorvic york ac uk>]

Hi!

I've just switched to Gnome in Red Hat 6.0 from KDE in 5.2, and before
IRIX/4Dwm and DEC/CDE. Overall I like both the appearance and the
useability of Gnome very much, and hope to stick with it.

Unfortunately I am having one big problem, which is memory usage
(my machine has 32Mb). Checking the system monitor, it seems that
huge amounts of memory are being used by things which seem
intuitively very simple: for example, the resident size of the little
applet which prints the time and date on the panel is 3Mb, and the
pager/task list applet is similar. And of course, gmc takes about 5Mb
just to maintain the desktop icons. I could kill all of these, but then
I may as well go back to KDE.

Changing gtk themes doesn't seem to help. I gained a little bit of
space by replacing Enlightenment with wmx (compiled without pixmaps
and stripped for 82K executable), which I now use on a 486 laptop and
SGI Indy at work too ( http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wmx/ )

Another memory consuming problem I have is that I can't get Gnome help
pages to appear in the help browser - it insists on using Netscape,
which leads to extensive disk thrashing. Even the help menu in the
Gnome help browser itself brings up Netscape. I've changed the
mime handler for html in the mime-types control panel (only affects gmc),
and changed all the entries in the URL-handlers control panel to start
the help browser rather than gnome-moz-remote (ghelp and the other two
change OK, but if I change default it has changed back when I close
and reopen the control center, there is no effect on behaviour).
Is there any way I can overcome this and force everything to go
to the help browser, or even to kfm?

So can anyone tell me how to fix this? Also, is there any
fix for the memory consumption? I'm happy to recompile a newer
version or mess around with flags if necessary.

Apart from that, great work. Keep it up!

Kevin
Dr. Kevin Cowtan, Structural Biology Laboratory, University of York, UK