ELC2009: Visualizing memory usage with smem [LWN.net]

ELC2009: Visualizing memory usage with smem

Posted Apr 30, 2009 6:21 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
Parent article: ELC2009: Visualizing memory usage with smem

Why is konsole *that* big in the first screenshot ? Does it have a huge
history collected ?

Alex

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ELC2009: Visualizing memory usage with smem

Posted Apr 30, 2009 13:05 UTC (Thu) by robertknight (guest, #42536) [Link] (2 responses)

Probably. Memory usage will depend mostly on the number of open tabs (or windows) and the size of the scrollback in each.

The storage of history in Konsole is not space efficient and there is a lot that could be done to improve it. Currently it uses 11 bytes per non-blank character (2 for the character itself + 9 for formatting) + (at least) 17 bytes per line. However, given the default settings of a maximum of 1000 lines, with a relatively small average length and normal usage habits of 4-10 tabs open means that memory usage does not grow huge.

One important thing to note is that no music player or web browser is open which makes the picture look quite different from that most users would see - with Firefox being the dominating application by an order of magnitude.

The standard top utility, as is well known, does not give very useful figures. Modern versions of KDE's System Monitor are much better in my view.

ELC2009: Visualizing memory usage with smem

Posted Apr 30, 2009 13:11 UTC (Thu) by robertknight (guest, #42536) [Link]

I left of the end of my previous response.

The standard top utility, as is well known, does not give very useful figures. Modern versions of KDE's System Monitor are much better in my view and graphical tools like this are a good way of getting people to notice inefficient applications.

ELC2009: Visualizing memory usage with smem

Posted Apr 30, 2009 14:24 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

Not necessarily so... The pie chart diagram mentions that smem was run only for processes whose name begins with a 'k'. But, I agree that Firefox would undoubtedly be the biggest slice of pie if it were shown.

ELC2009: Visualizing memory usage with smem

Posted Apr 30, 2009 14:00 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

> Why is konsole *that* big in the first screenshot ? Does it have a huge
> history collected ?

huge history, multiple windows, each with multiple tabs ... i also filtered on processes starting with 'k' so that may be part of why it looks a bit funny as well.

jake