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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: kde, xfree & RAM
From:       Damien Uern <morpheus_2606 () internode ! on ! net>
Date:       2004-06-11 7:32:25
Message-ID: 200406111650.32621.morpheus_2606 () internode ! on ! net
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On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:23 am, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> On Thursday 10 June 2004 01:28, Michael Pyne wrote:
> > On Wednesday 09 June 2004 19:11, Jean-Philippe Schneider wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > In seeing table in ksysguard, i was stomached... For example i saw that
> > > kopete takes 40Mo of physical mem and 60 of virtual...
> > > Is that normal??? Ithink it is a little bit heavy!
> > > If someone could explain me ;)
> >
> > It's a common misperception, because of the way memory reporting works
> > under Linux.
> >
> > The physical memory and virtual memory reports include not only Kopete,
> > but any shared libraries it may be using.  This includes glibc, Internet
> > support, and KDE too, of course. ;-)
> >
> > Don't worry, though.  Most of that memory is shared by Linux between
> > programs. So if you started up Kopete again, it doesn't double the memory
> > use.
> >
> > If you'd like to see how much memory there is left, there should be a
> > module for that in ksysguard, or you can just use the free command from
> > the shell.
>
> Find the proces-nr using "ps -aF | grep <insert application-name>" then
> type "cat proc/<processnr>/status" look for the lines that looks like this:
> VmSize:    48620 kB
> VmLck:         0 kB
> VmRSS:     29844 kB
> VmData:     7984 kB
> VmStk:        40 kB
> VmExe:        40 kB
> VmLib:     30956 kB
>
> This is the result of a "konqueror --preload" on my installation where
> debug-info is enable. It tells us that konqueror has linked to 20Mbyte of
> libraries, and uses around 8Mbyte itself. VmSize and VmRSS typically
> reported by ksysguard or top are useless.
>
> Btw. Kopete uses about 3 Mbyte of data.
>
> `Allan

Yeah I know the problem is not as bad as ksysguard, top, etc make it out to 
be. But people posting on the Osnews.com and now slashdot.org threads on this 
matter (and elsewhere and my own experiences) suggest that KDE is slower than 
even WinXP on the same hardware. Is it because it's swapping? The RAM usage 
is too high? Are there too many relocations or other problems on application 
startup causing slow launch times? Could gcc or the linker be improved to 
help with launch times? Is the drawing speed of XFree86 too slow and causing 
perceived sluggishness?

I think it's probably a bit of everything, and as Waldo Bastian mentioned on 
this thread, we need tools to help find the problem areas. User experiences 
of "slowness" don't really tell us what the problem is, so we need real data.

We've got Valgrind and gprof, and there's an X Resources program that tells us 
how much memory in the X server each app is using :

http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/xrestop

I might try the latest KDE on my PR233 with 96MB of RAM just to see how 
useable it is (I've used KDE 2.2.2 on a Celeron 500 with 60MB of RAM and it 
ran okay; slightly slower than WinME but not too much slower).

Damien

- -- 
Bender: OK, but I don't want anyone thinking we're robosexuals.
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