Re: [Nautilus-list] 4 nautilus processes chewing up memory

[Mario Vukelic <mario vukelic chello at>]

On Mon, 2002-02-11 at 20:57, Alex Larsson wrote:

> > Someone should just fix top. Apparently it requires libc changes or
> > something though.
> 
> Everyone claims it needs kernel patches. The kernel has no concept of 
> which threads make up the same process. They are just different processes 
> that share some objects (e.g. the mappings).

I agree that fixing top would be the sensible thing to do. If the kernel
needs to be changed it doesn't seem very likely to be fixed too soon.
(Why does Procman manage to get it right, then??) Whatever, this problem
has come up on various mailing lists for so long that one would think
that if it's an easy fix someone would have made it. In the meantime, I
think it would be sensible not to do nothing, but add a sentence or two
to the Nautilus user docs or better yet in the Gnome Fundamentals user
docs (in yelp) explaining the problem in newbie understandable terms and
providing a workaround:

"If you use the top or ps command line utilities to have a look at
programs running on you system (also called the processes) you often see
the same programm appearing several times in their output. Each of these
occurences seems to use a portion of your system memory, adding up to
significant amounts. Do not be alarmed! Multithreaded programs (like,
e.g. nautilus, <add other Gnome programs here>) look to ps and top as if
each thread were a separate process with its own portion of memory. In
reality, all those threads share the same portion of memory. This is a
problem with top and ps and will be fixed <some time>. In the meantime,
we recommend to use Gnome's System Monitor, Procman, to get information
on memory usage of such programs. Procman is aware of program threads
and displays their memory usage realistically. It also visibly groups
threads that belong together, so that the information is easier to
interpret. If you wish to learn more about multithreaded programs, you
may want to take a look at the information provided here
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/threads/definition.html or here http://www.ibiblio.org/javafaq/course/week11/02.html";

I think that should be understandable for Gnome's currently targeted
audience? Wouldn't it be better to add a short piece of info than having
confused newbies crying "murder" on all those Gnome and Distribution
related mailing lists/newsgroups/web fora? (And those are those that
actually ask! The others we don't reach and they'll forever think that
Nautilus needs 128 MBs of RAM. Bad thing)
-- 

I did not vote for the Austrian government