Re: GNOME has a major memory hole somewhere.

[William R Pentney <pentney cse Buffalo EDU>]

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Tom Gilbert wrote:

Thanks to everyone who replied. Upon further inspection, much of that 95%
is indeed cache/buffer space, which I suppose is not so ridiculous. I
found it particularly strange because the amount of memory being used upon
bootup of GNOME seems to vary so wildly, despite carrying about the same
load of programs each time - sometimes only 70% or so of the memory is
being used for something or other. (This was what led me to think there
might be a memory hole.) Oh, and I have 80M on my system.

- Bill

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

> 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...