Doing it for the kids, man [LWN.net]

Doing it for the kids, man

Posted Oct 28, 2006 22:51 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Doing it for the kids, man by Tara_Li
Parent article: Doing it for the kids, man: Children's laptop inspires open source projects (LinuxWorld)

X is actually trim enough to run on machines a fraction the size of that.
If you install the kdrive X server, well, that thing is meant to run on
*handhelds*.

What bloats X up a lot is applications storing vast amounts of pixmap crud
inside it for not much reason (gecko is a *major* culprit here). The RSS
counts are rendered even more inaccurate lot of the allegedly `resident'
memory is actually mmap()ed video card memory, i.e., not your precious
general-purpose physical RAM at all.

(You may find the `xrestop' program useful for tracking down hogs. My
biggest hog right now is Konqueror, with 11Mb of pixmap memory used, but
then it *does* have thirty tabs open.)

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Doing it for the kids, man

Posted Oct 29, 2006 19:51 UTC (Sun) by Tara_Li (subscriber, #26706) [Link]

It's starting to sound like the one tool Linux *desperately* needs is a *REAL* way to sort out memory usage - what's swapped out, what's memory mapped in from some device, what belongs to what program or library, which programs are sharing which pieces from which libraries, and stuff like that. It doesn't seem to be a simple problem, considering how many different answers you get from ps, pmap, xrestop, and one I can't remember right now that uses a kernel module to tag memory allocations...

It might help settle arguments about who's actually leaking memory.

Doing it for the kids, man

Posted Oct 30, 2006 9:15 UTC (Mon) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

Indeed. Qt and GTK are really bad too. There was an article on LWN some years ago where someone had tracked what these libraries actually do with the X protocol, and there was lots and lots of redundance. That's why X latency over long links has become worse over the years. Qt is said to have improved with v4 but I haven't looked into it myself.