[ale] Linux desktop inefficiencies...

[hbbs at attbi.com]

Just to add my two cents, I believe that as of kernel 2.4, it isn't very
productive to get all wrapped around the axle about how much RAM is in use in
your system or how much RAM any given app takes or seems to take.  It's my
understanding that the guiding philosophy is that physical RAM in a box is in
fact not subject to being pulled out of its slot at any given moment and as
such, the OS stakes out RAM very liberally.  As an admin/user, the important
thing to watch is swap (not AMOUNT but TRAFFIC).  Negligible/occasional swap
traffic means you're okay.  There seems to have been a
realization/acknowledgement that machines can read/write anywhere in their
physical RAM space with great freedom, especially if the machine already knows
that it's okay to do so and doesn't have to expend cycles finding out first.

- Jeff
> It's really not quite as bad as you think. Most of those apps store some
> history that gets dropped out when it's no longer needed (or another app
> calls for RAM). GWeather seems to store all the data of its updates
> until you kill -9 it and it asks to restart. 
> 
> Responsiveness is a function of some of the kernel changes. Some
> upcoming changes (low latency, etc) will make a drastic difference in
> responsivity.  
> 
> But , yes, memory requirements are climbing as users expect more "stuff"
> to be there.
> 
> twm is very light and fast. But it is seriously ugly and hard to use. 
> 
> On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 13:00, John Wells wrote:
> > <rant>
> > Is it just me, or are Gnome and KDE apps complete memory hogs?  I'm 
> > trying to scrounge by on 256mb of memory under RH 9/Gnome, and man, is it 
> > difficult.  Now, part of the problem is that I use java quite a bit, but 
> > typically don't have more than one jvm going at a time.
> > 
> > Apps you'd think would have relatively small footprint are huge, in my 

> > opinion.  For example, running Gnome System Monitor consumes 9.2MB on my 
> > system...why?  Why in the world would that consume so much memory?  It 
> > makes no sense to me that the monitoring of network/cpu/memory should be 
> > so consuming...
> > 
> > Nautilus has always been a hog (8.2 currently...which seems to be an 
> > improvement over past versions), gnome-panel at 12.2 MB, gnome-terminal at 
> > 13.3MB, gweather-applet-2 at 4.4MB...
> > 
> > When I first installed RH 5.2 back in 99, I was able to run WindowMaker or 
> > Afterstep with quite a few apps going in 16 megs of RAM.  I couldn't fit 
> > RH9's big toe in that box.
> > 
> > I don't run KDE, but I've heard from friends that it's essentially just as 
> > bad...
> > 
> > So what's the culprit?  Is it Gnome's reliance on Corba?  Is it poor 
> > design of the toolkits themselves?  Is it the underlying X protocol? 
> > I shudder to say this, but applications on Windows that do the equivalent 

> > of many of the above have much smaller footprints and are more responsive 
> > under heavy load.  
> > </rant>
> > 
> > Don't get me wrong...I love linux, and I'm particularly home in 
> > Gnome....but sometimes things just don't seem right.
> > 
> > Anyone have any insight?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > John
> > 
> > 
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> -- 
> James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
> CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
> Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
> 770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
> http://www.localnetsolutions.com
> 
> GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) 
> <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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