Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus and memory usage (performance issue)

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Pavel Cisler <pavel eazel com> writes:

> Seth Nickell wrote:
> > 
> > I normally don't track memory that closely, but I was pretty surprised
> > to open gtop while running Nautilus.
> > 
> > http://null.stanford.edu/mem.png shows visually just how much memory we
> > are using. There's a fair number of apps running right there, but the
> > single two biggest processes are nautilus (dramatically) and
> > nautilus-notes, clocking in at 144MB and 30MB respectively. GIMP with an
> > image open is one of those applications smaller than nautilus-notes
> > (!!!). I can understand nautilus itself being a large application, but
> > nautilus-notes?
> 
> gtop is a damn liar and doesn't have a clue about threads. The real memory usage
> will be a little more than the number you see divided by the number of the
> actitve threads. 

Yeah, I forgot that gtop was utterly broken this way with regard to
threads.
 
> Sadly I don't think there is a tool that would reflect the memory used by a
> process accurately on Linux. If someone knows of one, I'd be very interested.
> 

I think measuring the change in free memory before and after running
it is the best way of measuring memory load as it affects the user,
even though it does not measure any single process accurately (it
includes extra memory consumed by the X server for instance).

BTW, the 12 MB number I cited was effectively for all the nautilus
affiliated processes down to oafd but relative to already running a
GNOME desktop including the panel, some gnome-terminals, x-chat, and a
few other things. So I think it's actually a really good measure of
the memory cost Nautilus will actually add.

I should perhaps do the same measurement for gmc at some point. The
Nautilus cost is also higher than it needs to be right now due to the
out of process throbber, I need to measure what difference that makes.

 - Maciej