Re: GNOME has a major memory hole somewhere.

[Tom Gilbert <gilbertt tomgilbert freeserve co uk>]

On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, William R Pentney wrote:

->Or so it would seem. I can check available memory, open up an xterm, close
->it, and then check the available memory again, and it has decreased by
->anywhere from 4 to 100 or so bytes.
->
->There's probably more than that, too. There's absolutely no reason I
->can think of why GNOME and IceWM should take up 95% of my system memory
->when nothing else is open. (I should also note that when I run GNOME
->with Enlightenment, about 95% of the memory is also used; isn't
->Enlightenment supposed to carry a significantly heavier load than
->IceWM?) Any suggestions/comments?
->
->- Bill

How much memory do you have? Whether it should all be used depends on how
much you have :-) Are looking at a Hi-res background at the moment? How
many apps do you have running? How many applets are ticking away in your
panel? There are very many reasons why Gnome and enlightenment could use
up 95% of your memory. (Unless you have a couple of terrabytes plugged
in... In which case we should probably launch a bug-hunt now).

I have seen many users complain of high memory usage when they're sitting
at a desktop at 1024x768 with a hi-res background, 6 or 7 transparent
terminal windows running, along with emacs, 15 applets, a mail program, an
irc program and x11amp happily humming away underneath it all, caching
half of each track before play.

My other comment is this. There are always the odd bugs in developing
software that can cause memory leaks. It could be that, but don't
jump to conclusions. You won't track down a memory leak by looking at 
available memory every so often. Don't expect memory usage to be so
static. If you open an xterm, and close it again, you should *not* expect
free memory to drop by x bytes, then increase by x bytes again. That's not
how it works. What with dynamically loadable modules, linked libraries,
shared pixmaps, session-management, icon-caches, bash-histories, cached
pixmaps, cached sounds (esd), etc etc, it is perfectly possible that you
open an app, lose x bytes of memory, and then close it, to only gain back
half of those. *However* the next app you open may draw on some of *those*
resources, and so use less itself, or they will be reallocated to
something after a period of unuse.

Memory does not go up and down as the result of some simple a+b=c formula,
too much other stuff goes on...

As to your last question, Enlightenment has various settings as to how
long to cache background images (for example), and imlib has a huge number
of memory management options, (take a long look at imlib_config, if you
have imlib). There are ways to make enlightenment behave in a tight space.
I have no experience of this, with 256Mb ;-) but I think it really depends
on how much use you make of huge, hi-res backgrounds and pretty icons than
anything else...

In contrast, iceWm is more suited to lower memory systems, (IMHO), as it's
fairly simple and uncomplicated, more lean but less ambitious then
enlightenment.

YMMV.

Tom.

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