[Nautilus-list] Nautilus and memory usage (performance issue)

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I normally don't track memory that closely, but I was pretty surprised
to open gtop while running Nautilus.

http://null.stanford.edu/mem.png shows visually just how much memory we
are using. There's a fair number of apps running right there, but the
single two biggest processes are nautilus (dramatically) and
nautilus-notes, clocking in at 144MB and 30MB respectively. GIMP with an
image open is one of those applications smaller than nautilus-notes
(!!!). I can understand nautilus itself being a large application, but
nautilus-notes?

Everything between the two red bars is a directly-nautilus-related
process (e.g. doesn't include oafd, gconfd, etc). Note that this
Nautilus has been running for an hour or so. A fresh Nautilus process
only uses 110MB ( + other peripheral processes like nautilus-notes and
hyperbola).

Although speed is of direct importance to how users experience Nautilus,
I think memory usage becomes an important thing to consider for
something that will probably be "always on". It will affect a user's
experience of not just Nautilus, but all their applications. I haven't
noticed these problems because my system has an amount of ram
appropriate for development, but on a "normal" system with 64/128 megs
of RAM, Nautilus sure makes its presence felt. Particularly if you
alternate between using Nautilus and another application you get to wait
for 30+ seconds for Nautilus to swap itself in every time you use it :-)

-Seth