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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Hidding Virtual size column by default in ksysguard
From:       Randy Kramer <rhkramer () gmail ! com>
Date:       2007-01-06 16:31:10
Message-ID: 200701061131.10386.rhkramer () gmail ! com
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> > On Friday 05 January 2007 19:15, John Tapsell wrote:
> > >   I would love to hide the column showing the virtual size.  It's
> > > almost meaningless, and users will misinterpret it.

Just a comment from a (l)user: I have trouble with my Mandriva2006 system 
(using KDE) getting sluggish when too much memory/swap is in use.  Although 
I've tried getting more specific (and I've read, among others, Lubos' pages 
on memory use), what I generally notice is that the system gets sluggish when 
the swap used is about equal to the 1/2 the available swap.

(Aside: I haven't pinpointed that exactly and it may also be the that the 
slowdown occurs when the swap in use is about equal to the amount of RAM in 
the system--with the old guideline to provide swap equal to about twice the 
available RAM, the two are the same--I did experiment once with changing the 
size of swap to try to pin down which was really the limiting factor, but 
those tests were some time ago, and not really conclusive.)

Back to the point: When I find swap in use approaching the amount of RAM in 
the system, I start closing and restarting things like konqueror, kmail, 
net-monitor (in fact, I now have a cron job that restarts net-monitor 
nightly), and killing any instances of nspluginviewer to reduce the amount of 
swap in use.  I pick which to kill and restart based on their VIRT usage (I 
typically run 4 or more instances of konqueror).  I suppose that is fairly 
proportional to their RES usage, but I haven't really paid attention to RES 
to date.

Update: OK, I just started looking at RES--I see a konqueror task using 116 M 
of VIRT and 70 M of RES, and an Opera task using 96 M of VIRT and 17 M of 
RES.  So, at least across different applications, RES does not seem 
proportional to VIRT.  As I try closing these (later, after reading or saving 
the pages I'm viewing), I'll pay attention to see which releases the most 
swap).

At least for me (to date), watching the VIRT usage of tasks is something I do 
"continuously", and I'd hate to see a new system monitor be created without 
the ability to view VIRT (but changing the configuration to do so would be 
only a minor inconvenience).

Randy Kramer
 
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