Re: Increased RAM usage with nm-applet 0.8.0 to 0.8.1

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2011-12-12 at 23:09 +0200, Uwe Geuder wrote:
> On 12 December 2011 09:29, Jeff Hoogland <JeffHoogland Linux com> wrote:
> 
> > Attached are the two outputs you requested, digging through them now to see
> > if I can pinpoint the issue.
> >
> 
> Did you find out anything? 
> 
> I converted the outputs to csv, loaded them into an OpenOffice
> spreadsheet, summed up each category of memory and compared your 2
> versions.  The differences are really marginal, depending on the memory
> category sometimes in favor of the old and sometimes in favor of the new
> version. In terms of resident memory, which should be the most important
> measure (no swapping has occured) the new version is even 792 KiB (~ 7 %)
> smaller than the old one.

Thanks for looking at that; I was going to suggest something like this.
As you've pointed out, RSS is the value that really matters.  VSS
doesn't matter at all.  So any large (>25%) increases in RSS size
between the dumps in any one library are interesting.  But also that
would indicate increased usage *in that library*, not necessarily in
nm-applet.  Now if you haven't changed any other packages/libraries on
your system, but you've just changed nm-applet from 0.8.0 -> 0.8.1, then
it may be that nm-applet is now using those libraries in a different way
that results in a difference in memory usage.  ie, it's actually not
very straightforward to figure out this problem.  Anyway, if we can
figure out what might account for the change (if there is a large
change) then we can look at what might be causing it.  But if, as Uwe
says, the RSS actually *decreases* in 0.8.1 then we've already won? :)

Dan

> Unless my conversion script really screwed up something and by accident
> the bug just happened to level out your obvserved 110 MiB difference 
> such difference does not exist.
> 
> If anybody wants my script and my spreadsheets to double check I can send 
> them by personal mail. I don't want the flood the mailing list with big
> attachments, which are probably not of big interest for most
> readers. (There are also other tools to read smaps files on the net, I
> have never tried them.)
> 
> Memory consumption in Linux is a tricky thing. There are many different
> categories to measure (that's why smaps was added some time ago to show
> them all or at least many of them). There is no single correct number.
> If the tool you used to compute the 110 MiB delta shows only a single
> number, are you sure the way the number is calculated has not changed
> between your old and your new system? I assume you used the same tool in
> the old and the new system, otherwise it's even more likely that you
> ended up comparing apples and oranges.
> 
> 110 MB difference looks huge by any measure. According to to my results
> the mapped address space of the new version is "only" around 46 MiB. I don't
> think any reasonable measure can be bigger than the mapped space. (The
> old one is around 45 MiB, the difference 712 KiB)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Uwe
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