Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

Hey,

i was just looking through the system monitor to see how my memory
usage was doing and that gave me a impressive (negative way) result.
I've made a screenshot [1] of it and edited it a little. The color
that i added in mean:

- darkred : extreme memory usage for..?? nothing?
- red : gnome-panel related things (applets mostly)
- orange : first applet UNDER one MB.

Now if you take a look at the image you see that my current gnome
session is taking up:
4.9 MB (gnome-panel)
3.5 MB (mixer_applet2)
3.0 MB (wnck-applet)
2.3 MB (nm-applet)
1.2 MB (notification-area-applet)
1.1 MB (gnome-volume-manager)
0.7 MB (bluetooth-applet)

Totals to: 17.7 MB
That is only the gnome-panel stuff with it's applets. if you are gonna
take into account the stuff that is needed to run the applets (like
python) than it will likely use a lot more but since those a can be
used with other applications as well i will leave that out of it.

Now there are still 3 more left in the list i highlighted.
1. Nautilus
Oke.. this one is bothering me. at the time that i shot the screenshot
nautilus was not open (at least not the file browser) and than it's
taking up that much memory! that's just overkill!

2. gnome-settings-daemon
Why does this need to run? what's the purpose of it? If it's just
running for other programs to grab gnome settings (wild guess) than
it's using up way to much RAM anyway. otherwise it has to go.

3. puplet
Someone said this was efficient in Fedora 8.. doesn't look like it. (8 MB).

Now the notebook i'm typing this on has 1GB om memory and runs Fedora
fine so if i look at it that way than the ram usage is fine. but keep
in mind the people with less memory (256 or 512 MB's) they are gonna
get a hard time with this fedora. My total memory usage at the time of
this writing is: 432.00 MB (with GIMP on.. if that's closed than it's
"just" 400 MB).

What i'm trying to say here is that those gnome-panel applets are
taking up way to much memory regardless of the memory you can afford
or have in your computer. It should just be as fast and small as
possible with all the needed functions. 3.5 MB for the mixer applet
(which doesn't even support pulseaudio streams and is really basic!)
is just overkill (btw it's taking up 4.6 MB now). Perhaps all those
applets need to be checked on memory usage? or a completely new
gnome-panel + applets that just take up a few MB in total (instead of
17.7). Gnome and Fedora are currently looking fine the way they are.
so perhaps it's time to stop spending time on features for a while (2
releases? till Fedora 10?) and start spending all time/money/efforts
on performance memory usage and usability.

And again for the memory. Having much doesn't need that it needs to
use much! slow pc's with less memory should be able to run fedora
right? Simple example. imagine that a slow 500 MHz pc with 512MB
memory wants to run Fedora + compizfusion + Gimp. Now at this moment
he must drop compiz or gimp. if that panel stuff was just using normal
amounts of memory he would have been able to use all 3 (just a
example!!)

So.. is something gonna change with this memory abuse?

[1] http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6821/screenshotsystemmonitoryh4.png

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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

Mark wrote:
> Hey,
>
> i was just looking through the system monitor to see how my memory
> usage was doing and that gave me a impressive (negative way) result.
> I've made a screenshot [1] of it and edited it a little. The color
> that i added in mean:
>
> - darkred : extreme memory usage for..?? nothing?
> - red : gnome-panel related things (applets mostly)
> - orange : first applet UNDER one MB.
>
> Now if you take a look at the image you see that my current gnome
> session is taking up:
> 4.9 MB (gnome-panel)
> 3.5 MB (mixer_applet2)
> 3.0 MB (wnck-applet)
> 2.3 MB (nm-applet)
> 1.2 MB (notification-area-applet)
> 1.1 MB (gnome-volume-manager)
> 0.7 MB (bluetooth-applet)
>
> Totals to: 17.7 MB
> That is only the gnome-panel stuff with it's applets. if you are gonna
> take into account the stuff that is needed to run the applets (like
> python) than it will likely use a lot more but since those a can be
> used with other applications as well i will leave that out of it.
>
> Now there are still 3 more left in the list i highlighted.
> 1. Nautilus
> Oke.. this one is bothering me. at the time that i shot the screenshot
> nautilus was not open (at least not the file browser) and than it's
> taking up that much memory! that's just overkill!
>
> 2. gnome-settings-daemon
> Why does this need to run? what's the purpose of it? If it's just
> running for other programs to grab gnome settings (wild guess) than
> it's using up way to much RAM anyway. otherwise it has to go.
>
> 3. puplet
> Someone said this was efficient in Fedora 8.. doesn't look like it. (8 MB).
>
> Now the notebook i'm typing this on has 1GB om memory and runs Fedora
> fine so if i look at it that way than the ram usage is fine. but keep
> in mind the people with less memory (256 or 512 MB's) they are gonna
> get a hard time with this fedora. My total memory usage at the time of
> this writing is: 432.00 MB (with GIMP on.. if that's closed than it's
> "just" 400 MB).
>
> What i'm trying to say here is that those gnome-panel applets are
> taking up way to much memory regardless of the memory you can afford
> or have in your computer. It should just be as fast and small as
> possible with all the needed functions. 3.5 MB for the mixer applet
> (which doesn't even support pulseaudio streams and is really basic!)
> is just overkill (btw it's taking up 4.6 MB now). Perhaps all those
> applets need to be checked on memory usage? or a completely new
> gnome-panel + applets that just take up a few MB in total (instead of
> 17.7). Gnome and Fedora are currently looking fine the way they are.
> so perhaps it's time to stop spending time on features for a while (2
> releases? till Fedora 10?) and start spending all time/money/efforts
> on performance memory usage and usability.
>
> And again for the memory. Having much doesn't need that it needs to
> use much! slow pc's with less memory should be able to run fedora
> right? Simple example. imagine that a slow 500 MHz pc with 512MB
> memory wants to run Fedora + compizfusion + Gimp. Now at this moment
> he must drop compiz or gimp. if that panel stuff was just using normal
> amounts of memory he would have been able to use all 3 (just a
> example!!)
>
> So.. is something gonna change with this memory abuse?
>
> [1] http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6821/screenshotsystemmonitoryh4.png
>
>
Well, it might seem a lot, but your memory still has enough room left.
You say it has 432 mb free, but on my system it usually has like 15 mb
free (even on 2GB systems). This is not because Fedora takes up so much
memory, but because files are being cached in memory. If the need arises
that programs need more
memory, it will free up this space, and allow programs to take it up.

I'd double check "free" again, and look at the amount that cache is
taking up.

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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

> Well, it might seem a lot, but your memory still has enough room left.
> You say it has 432 mb free, but on my system it usually has like 15 mb
> free (even on 2GB systems). This is not because Fedora takes up so much
> memory, but because files are being cached in memory. If the need arises
> that programs need more
> memory, it will free up this space, and allow programs to take it up.
>
> I'd double check "free" again, and look at the amount that cache is
> taking up.

I checked it with the System Monitor tool (Applications -> System
Tools -> System Monitor). If Fedora is caching that much as showed in
the list i showed than i expect it to be a lot faster.

and i said it was using 432MB not free ;) free was probably more
because i have 1GB (1024 - 432 = 592 MB free). But again.. having it
free doesn't mean that it all needs to be used up for NO noticeable
purpose.

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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:26:23 +0100
Mark <markg85@gmail.com> wrote:

> ). If Fedora is caching that much as showed in
> the list i showed than i expect it to be a lot faster.

How do you know? Maybe the cache is allowing your system to run 10 times
faster than it would otherwise.

> But again.. having it
> free doesn't mean that it all needs to be used up for NO noticeable
> purpose.

Why not? If it's just laying around doing nothing, then it might as well do
something. Any benefit greater than zero is worthwhile in that situation.


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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

// begin note

i posted this in the fedora-list first but wasn't getting reply's that
are discussing what i say below. And for the memory (in the text
below).. Using it all up doesn't mean that it's used good. See it like
your a rich guy. you can spend it all at once or just go easy on it. i
would like to go for the latter one. + send to the gnome desktop devel
list

// end note


Hey,

i was just looking through the system monitor to see how my memory
usage was doing and that gave me a impressive (negative way) result.
I've made a screenshot [1] of it and edited it a little. The color
that i added in mean:

- darkred : extreme memory usage for..?? nothing?
- red : gnome-panel related things (applets mostly)
- orange : first applet UNDER one MB.

Now if you take a look at the image you see that my current gnome
session is taking up:
4.9 MB (gnome-panel)
3.5 MB (mixer_applet2)
3.0 MB (wnck-applet)
2.3 MB (nm-applet)
1.2 MB (notification-area-applet)
1.1 MB (gnome-volume-manager)
0.7 MB (bluetooth-applet)

Totals to: 17.7 MB
That is only the gnome-panel stuff with it's applets. if you are gonna
take into account the stuff that is needed to run the applets (like
python) than it will likely use a lot more but since those a can be
used with other applications as well i will leave that out of it.

Now there are still 3 more left in the list i highlighted.
1. Nautilus
Oke.. this one is bothering me. at the time that i shot the screenshot
nautilus was not open (at least not the file browser) and than it's
taking up that much memory! that's just overkill!

2. gnome-settings-daemon
Why does this need to run? what's the purpose of it? If it's just
running for other programs to grab gnome settings (wild guess) than
it's using up way to much RAM anyway. otherwise it has to go.

3. puplet
Someone said this was efficient in Fedora 8.. doesn't look like it. (8 MB).

Now the notebook i'm typing this on has 1GB om memory and runs Fedora
fine so if i look at it that way than the ram usage is fine. but keep
in mind the people with less memory (256 or 512 MB's) they are gonna
get a hard time with this fedora. My total memory usage at the time of
this writing is: 432.00 MB (with GIMP on.. if that's closed than it's
"just" 400 MB).

What i'm trying to say here is that those gnome-panel applets are
taking up way to much memory regardless of the memory you can afford
or have in your computer. It should just be as fast and small as
possible with all the needed functions. 3.5 MB for the mixer applet
(which doesn't even support pulseaudio streams and is really basic!)
is just overkill (btw it's taking up 4.6 MB now). Perhaps all those
applets need to be checked on memory usage? or a completely new
gnome-panel + applets that just take up a few MB in total (instead of
17.7). Gnome and Fedora are currently looking fine the way they are.
so perhaps it's time to stop spending time on features for a while (2
releases? till Fedora 10?) and start spending all time/money/efforts
on performance memory usage and usability.

And again for the memory. Having much doesn't need that it needs to
use much! slow pc's with less memory should be able to run fedora
right? Simple example. imagine that a slow 500 MHz pc with 512MB
memory wants to run Fedora + compizfusion + Gimp. Now at this moment
he must drop compiz or gimp. if that panel stuff was just using normal
amounts of memory he would have been able to use all 3 (just a
example!!)

So.. is something gonna change with this memory abuse?

[1] http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6821/screenshotsystemmonitoryh4.png

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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

Mark wrote:
> Now the notebook i'm typing this on has 1GB om memory and runs Fedora
> fine so if i look at it that way than the ram usage is fine. but keep
> in mind the people with less memory (256 or 512 MB's) they are gonna
> get a hard time with this fedora. My total memory usage at the time of
> this writing is: 432.00 MB (with GIMP on.. if that's closed than it's
> "just" 400 MB).

My P4 desktop system is currently showing 880Mb of memory 'in use' with 140Mb or
so free... and its doing nothing but playing mp3s from rhythmbox. That actually
doesn't tell you much however, since its been running for a week and most of
that memory isn't actually being 'used' atm. The machine has 144k of the 2Gb
swap 'in use'. This is a good thing, nothing should be swapped if it doesn't
need to be.

> What i'm trying to say here is that those gnome-panel applets are
> taking up way to much memory regardless of the memory you can afford
> or have in your computer. It should just be as fast and small as
> possible with all the needed functions.

Yes, but who defines what are the needed functions and how much memory those
require? Its not always simple choice to immediately release all memory used by
a program that isn't critical right now... I do not want clock cycles spent
recalculating things an application should have just stored for awhile.

> Gnome and Fedora are currently looking fine the way they are.
> so perhaps it's time to stop spending time on features for a while (2
> releases? till Fedora 10?) and start spending all time/money/efforts
> on performance memory usage and usability.

These are mostly upstream issues for Fedora. The tradeoffs of newer features
versus higher performance tweaking is always difficult, especially when the
people doing the programming have to do both... new features are usually more
fun to deal with.

Usability is at odds against performance and memory usage for the most part.
Having things preloaded, cached, etc, increases usability and overall polish.
When popping open a help window for instance, the faster it shows up the better
for the user. If memory is used for some of the libraries it may depend on, so
it opens faster, that memory may seem wasted until you save the 2-3s waiting for
a window.

I don't mean to sound argumentative, but keep this in mind: working without X
uses less memory, but your memory isn't useful to you unless something
meaningful is being written on its bits... in a very extreme sense thats relevant.

> And again for the memory. Having much doesn't need that it needs to
> use much! slow pc's with less memory should be able to run fedora
> right? Simple example. imagine that a slow 500 MHz pc with 512MB
> memory wants to run Fedora + compizfusion + Gimp. Now at this moment
> he must drop compiz or gimp. if that panel stuff was just using normal
> amounts of memory he would have been able to use all 3 (just a
> example!!)

My HP Ipaq won't run compizfusion either... and development of fusion (and its
memory needs) shouldn't be held back by that. A 500Mhz machine is clearly out
of the hardware target specs for 3d accelerated fusion. While your main point
(reduce memory usage if possible!) is good, keep in mind that 12 year old
machines do NOT have to run the newest OS goodies 'well'.

I'm pretty sure a 500Mhz machine will perform adequately well with Fedora 8
running a light window manager such as blackbox, perhaps even XFCE4, but Gnome2
is asking too much IMO.

Also, looking at your system monitor window as is you're not getting a very
clear picture of what is going on with your memory just from that 'Memory'
column (maybe you already know this). Add the other columns, especially shared,
resident, and virtual memory. Look at the memory map (right click), sort by the
various columns, and you'll see that much of the memory shown as used is from
loaded libraries and caching (in the case of nautilus especially). The 'bloat'
in a programs memory is going to show up as private memory not associated with a
file; there is where the program is storing most of own 'stuff'.

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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 09:34 +0100, Mark wrote:

> i was just looking through the system monitor to see how my memory
> usage was doing and that gave me a impressive (negative way) result.
> I've made a screenshot [1] of it and edited it a little. The color
> that i added in mean:
>
> - darkred : extreme memory usage for..?? nothing?
> - red : gnome-panel related things (applets mostly)
> - orange : first applet UNDER one MB.
>
> Now if you take a look at the image you see that my current gnome
> session is taking up:
> 4.9 MB (gnome-panel)
> 3.5 MB (mixer_applet2)
> 3.0 MB (wnck-applet)
> 2.3 MB (nm-applet)
> 1.2 MB (notification-area-applet)
> 1.1 MB (gnome-volume-manager)
> 0.7 MB (bluetooth-applet)

I was kind of worried about the default choice of applets for a
different reason -- they seem to slow Gnome startup very much. Did
anyone notice, that Fedora 8 Gnome startup takes roughly two times
longer than Fedora 6 one? On the other side I just took it as a fact of
life, and disabled things that I don't use like bluetooth or tomboy in
my kickstarts. All in all, the same thing applies for services.

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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:34:09 +0100, Mark wrote:
> i was just looking through the system monitor to see how my memory usage
> was doing and that gave me a impressive (negative way) result. I've made
> a screenshot [1] of it and edited it a little.
> ...
> Now the notebook i'm typing this on has 1GB om memory and runs Fedora
> fine so if i look at it that way than the ram usage is fine. but keep in
> mind the people with less memory (256 or 512 MB's) they are gonna get a
> hard time with this fedora. My total memory usage at the time of this
> writing is: 432.00 MB (with GIMP on.. if that's closed than it's "just"
> 400 MB).
>
> What i'm trying to say here is that those gnome-panel applets are taking
> up way to much memory regardless of the memory you can afford or have in
> your computer.
> ...
> So.. is something gonna change with this memory abuse?
> ,
> [1]
> http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6821/screenshotsystemmonitoryh4.png

I agree with you completely about the memory usage of Fedora 8, it has
got VERY bloated recently.

This laptop is x86_64 and has 1GB RAM. Up to and including FC6 this was
fine and it hardly ever reached the limit, performance was always good.
Starting with Fedora 7, and really much more obvious now with Fedora 8
I'm finding it's using far too much RAM and regularly hitting swap very
badly. Performance has suffered considerably. I've been thinking of
shelling out some cash on 2x 1GB SODIMMs, but unfortunately these DDR1
versions are very expensive.

As an example, there's two users logged in at the moment, I'm running
evolution, galeon, and an xterm. The other login has nothing extra
running, it's just gnome.

Here is the output of free:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1027656 1008372 19284 0 43276 135564
-/+ buffers/cache: 829532 198124
Swap: 1048568 48 1048520

Yes, 810MB of memory really in use. I'm running gdesklets but not running
other new stuff such as NetworkManager, yum applets, compiz etc. This
level of memory use feels quite excessive.

Unfortunately determining where RAM has gone is still somewhat difficult
on Linux. It would be great to have Matt Mackall's patches in, or Exmap
available. The best I've found without having to patch the kernel is:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py

Running this as root, the biggest culprits are:

Private + Shared = RAM used Program
3.4 MiB + 7.6 MiB = 11.0 MiB notification-area-applet (2)
10.6 MiB + 1.8 MiB = 12.4 MiB gconfd-2 (2)
11.8 MiB + 1.3 MiB = 13.1 MiB bbackupd
4.4 MiB + 9.4 MiB = 13.8 MiB evolution-alarm-notify (2)
5.3 MiB + 8.9 MiB = 14.2 MiB mail-notification (2)
4.7 MiB + 9.7 MiB = 14.4 MiB metacity (2)
8.2 MiB + 7.5 MiB = 15.7 MiB gnome-power-manager (2)
4.1 MiB + 11.6 MiB = 15.7 MiB padevchooser
15.3 MiB + 556.0 KiB = 15.8 MiB restorecond
14.5 MiB + 1.6 MiB = 16.1 MiB xterm
6.0 MiB + 10.3 MiB = 16.3 MiB notification-daemon (2)
6.0 MiB + 11.7 MiB = 17.7 MiB wnck-applet (2)
6.1 MiB + 11.7 MiB = 17.8 MiB clock-applet (2)
8.8 MiB + 12.5 MiB = 21.3 MiB mixer_applet2 (2)
11.0 MiB + 13.4 MiB = 24.5 MiB gnome-panel (2)
13.9 MiB + 15.7 MiB = 29.7 MiB /usr/libexec/re
23.0 MiB + 9.0 MiB = 31.9 MiB gnome-settings-daemon (2)
21.5 MiB + 15.8 MiB = 37.3 MiB nautilus (2)
23.9 MiB + 18.0 MiB = 41.9 MiB evolution
30.3 MiB + 13.2 MiB = 43.5 MiB /usr/bin/sealer (2)
34.7 MiB + 14.7 MiB = 49.5 MiB deskbar-applet
43.1 MiB + 8.5 MiB = 51.7 MiB beagled (2)
50.8 MiB + 10.4 MiB = 61.2 MiB Xorg (2)
80.2 MiB + 12.7 MiB = 92.9 MiB python (4)
80.6 MiB + 16.1 MiB = 96.7 MiB galeon

Galeon seems a bit heavy at 80M for a few tabs, but mozilla based browers
aren't renowned for being light.

What really stands out for me here is deskbar-applet, how can that be
using all that memory? Also sealert and beagled are very excessive.

To verify the numbers above I killed these tasks off and checked the
reduction in used space (- buffers). The expectation is to see the
private memory returned, and that's almost exactly what I got:

1 x deskbar-applet 35MB
2 x beagled 44MB
2 x sealert 32MB

Over 100MB returned by removing a few almost never used programs, but I'm
still at 698MB, which is still way too much.

Looking back up that list there's many other things that are using too
much memory. How does a clock applet use over 6MB of private memory?

Cheers,

Martin.


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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 22:11 +0000, Martin Ebourne wrote:
> I agree with you completely about the memory usage of Fedora 8, it has
> got VERY bloated recently.

I remember when I popped 512mb into my system back around 2002. Was
running Red Hat 8 as I recall. I never, ever got the thing to use more
than half of it. No matter how many tabs I opened in Mozilla, no matter
how many kernels I compiled, I had a good 256mb worth of disk cache at
all times, and it never hit swap. I remember losing entire 100mb files
because that machine was a bit flaky and would hang sometimes, with the
file never being written to disk. I got into a habit of typing 'sync' a
few times after doing anything important, a habit I still have to this
day.

So now I'm sitting on a laptop with 512mb, running Fedora 8. I'm running
Galeon and Evolution, and they're eating up 304M RAM and 428M swap.

Sigh.
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Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps
 

On Sat, 01 Dec 2007, Callum Lerwick wrote:

>
> On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 22:11 +0000, Martin Ebourne wrote:
> > I agree with you completely about the memory usage of Fedora 8, it has
> > got VERY bloated recently.
>
> I remember when I popped 512mb into my system back around 2002. Was
> running Red Hat 8 as I recall. I never, ever got the thing to use more
> than half of it. No matter how many tabs I opened in Mozilla, no matter
> how many kernels I compiled, I had a good 256mb worth of disk cache at
> all times, and it never hit swap. I remember losing entire 100mb files
> because that machine was a bit flaky and would hang sometimes, with the
> file never being written to disk. I got into a habit of typing 'sync' a
> few times after doing anything important, a habit I still have to this
> day.
>
> So now I'm sitting on a laptop with 512mb, running Fedora 8. I'm running
> Galeon and Evolution, and they're eating up 304M RAM and 428M swap.
>

I recently upgraded a 3 1/2 year old laptop with 512MiB to Fedora 8 and
the level of memory usage when running nothing but Firefox seemed to
cause frequent stalls when it was completely unresponsive for 30 seconds
at a time.

Admittedly this is only anecdotal evidence, but this doesn't happen on a
newer one with 2GiB.

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