questioner

I just did a "ps aux" on my Linux system and realized that
Firefox uses a massive 47 MB of RAM, and Thunderbird
uses an amazing 45 MB. I don't have a "hot rod" P4 computer
so perhaps this is all the more alarming to me, but
something seems to have gone wrong, I think. These are
programs that deal with piddling amounts of user data,
yet there so big!

I know that a good chunk of each is just shared
libraries, or so I infer because it seems to say that
the intrinsic usage is more like 25 MB each, but still...
25 megabytes is a lot of memory.

Just what the heck is all that RAM being used for
anyway?

And how has it come to this, that software that
deals with mere tens or hundreds of kilobytes of actual
user data somehow requires tens of megabytes of memory
to process it?

And I know what some will say, oh, the Windoze
and the Macintosh applications use the same
amount of memory... Well that doesn't justify it
in my view. Three examples of bad engineering
(or no engineering at all, I should say) don't make
it right.

jan panteltje

On a sunny day (26 Dec 2005 06:28:32 -0800) it happened "Questioner"

Not to worry,. it will all be swapped out to disk :-)
On the Duron 950
top
Mem: 386780K av, 382692K used, 4088K free, 0K shrd, 8184K buff
Swap: 530104K av, 176208K used, 353896K free 181920K cached
hehe


The 2 GB chip is out from Samsung and some others, 8 of these make 2GByte.
2000 / 25 = 80 Firefoxes..
This is likely the way of thinking, remember Billy The Gates claiming:
'640 KILO Byte should be enough for anyone?'
Price per bit is going way down....


my_memory = (char*) malloc(25000000); ?


yea, look how long it takes to render some html pages....


Aha, well, many years ago I thought:
'mm maybe I should write my own webbrowser'.
Some related routines are in NewsFleX newsreader (I wrote), but I learned
really fast: That writing a good webbrowser is a lifetime project....
And some already are at it....
You can join them or improve, it is open source.
Something Win XP / exploder users cannot do.
But considering that cost per byte thingy, make sure your time adds up to
enough saving....

mst

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=407044
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/25/1817215

--
remove MYSHOES to email

viator

I tried that myself. HTML is bad enough, I got it mostly working,
but adding Javascript would have taken real dedication.
I try to use Dillo when I am viewing simple pages. It's *much*
faster than Firefox on my older system.

Yeah, but meanwhile, the landfills are filling up with our toxic
electronic waste, leaching it into our water supply etc.

jan panteltje

On a sunny day (26 Dec 2005 07:29:51 -0800) it happened "Viator"


Yeah, but meanwhile, the landfills are filling up with our toxic

Not to worry, that will all disappear in the background noise once the
WW3 nukes start flying in April (accourding to Dr. Sarfatti).

john hasler

Questioner writes:

So don't use Firefox or Thunderbird. There are many alternatives.
--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI USA

nils_o._selåsdal

And you're complaining ? :
http://asgaard.homelinux.org/top.txt

(So firefox and a lot of "modern" applications,GUI mostly,
are bloat - news at 11.)

mst

PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
19310 0.0 0.0 3616 1340 ? S 10:29 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/firefox
19315 0.9 3.3 111932 69744 ? Sl 10:29 0:42 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin

Compare to Flock (right after startup):

19539 0.0 0.0 3616 1348 ? S 11:42 0:00 /bin/sh /.../flock/flock
19542 0.0 0.0 3872 1356 ? S 11:42 0:00 /bin/sh /.../flock/...
19548 6.8 1.9 76700 41360 ? Sl 11:42 0:02 /.../flock/flock-bin

And after hitting about three websites:

19539 0.0 0.0 3616 1348 ? S 11:42 0:00 /bin/sh /.../flock/flock
19542 0.0 0.0 3872 1356 ? S 11:42 0:00 /bin/sh /.../flock/...
19548 6.1 3.4 124284 72496 ? Sl 11:42 0:14 /.../flock/flock-bin

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questioner

Panteltje a dit:


Oh, no. Not that idiot again. He came and did a presentation
at our Mensa group a couple years ago. I don't remember
the topic, but everyone pretty much picked apart his bogus
argumentation, showing he was full of it but in a polite way,
and then rather than admit he was wrong, he started acting petty
and issuing ad hominem attacks.

That isn't to say that WW3 isn't possible, but to pretend
Sarfatti has a clue about the how/why/when/who would
be too generous.

kasper dupont

First look through /proc/%d/maps to see how much
is used for memory mappings and how much are
anonymous allocations. If you think there is too
much anonymous memory, then you will need to go
hunting in the source.

--
Kasper Dupont
Note to self: Don't try to allocate
256000 pages with GFP_KERNEL on x86.