Applet Memory Usage

[Sean Thomas Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

I was taking a look at gtop and noticed that panel applets take (what
I consider to be) humungous amounts of memory.

tasklist: 4476k
modemlights: 3912k
mixer: 3900k
gproc: 4408k
deskguide: 4092k

I mean, this is ridiculous.  Netscape only uses 3672k (well, not
including the ld-linux.so it requires, which is like 15 MB, but oh
well), Abiword uses 5496k, and Sawfish only uses 3116k.  Why would this
tiny and rather simplistic applets take more memory than my web-browser
or my window manager?  Why do they almost match my word-processor with a
large document loaded?  Is this some kind of shared memory issue, or is
there some problem with the way applets are handled that make them eat
so much memory?

Anyways, I'm using Gnome 1.2, except for libgtop, since the libgtop that
comes with Gnome 1.2 isn't compatible with the gtop that comes with
Gnome 1.2 (or so the compilation said).

Sean Middleditch