[ale] Linux desktop inefficiencies...

[Joseph Knapka]

"John Wells" <jb at sourceillustrated.com> writes:

> I guess what I'm really getting at is....why do Windows apps, at least in
> the GUI sense, seem to run more efficiently memory-wise than Linux apps
> written in Gnome/KDE?
> 
> Now, I'm not painting with a big brush here....many windows apps are hogs
> in their own right.  But what I would call utility programs (explorers,
> sys mons, etc.) seem to be so much heavier under Gnome/KDE as far as
> memory imprint goes.
>

I'd beg to differ there. Explorer (that is, the Windows desktop) is
consistently the second- or third-largest memory consumer on my XP box,
after Mozilla and Eclipse.

> I assume it's because of the rather large separation of the underlying OS
> and X, but I'm not sure.

I suspect that it has more to do with the proliferation of
dependencies. Anything dependent on Gnome, for example, is going to
link with all the Gnome shared objects (== vast amount of code
space). And those libraries depend on Glibc and a bunch of other
stuff, and so forth.  The people who write code these days (Windows
people as well as OSS) simply don't care that much about resourc
usage; we're all jaded and assume Moore's Law will bail us out of any
resource pits we happen to fall into. So we use whatever libraries do
what we need, without fussing much about the cost at runtime (or the
ire of folks who want to install our stuff and find eighteen pages
worth of dependencies). Furthermore, note the following:

(2) When your executables are ELF (which they are), the values for RSS
and SIZE of a process *include* any libraries used by the exe, even
though (a) those libs are almost cerainly shared amongst many
processes, and (b) only pages of an exe or lib that are actually
accessed contribute to the real memory footprint of a process (of
course, RSS only counts pages that are present in RAM, but it still
neglects sharing);

(3) The computation of process size for ELF executables is documented
to be broken (in the top man page, but not the ps one).

Cheers,

-- Joe
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