memory usage [LWN.net]

memory usage

Posted Jun 4, 2004 20:36 UTC (Fri) by ranger (guest, #6415)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

While xterm may use about 8 times less memory than konsole (with 6 tabs open at present), each new terminal requires another 2MB, whereas a new tab in konsole doesn't.

So, if you're in the position where you are already using screen and need multiple terminals, xterm doesn't have so many advantages.

BTW, konsole has profiles too - but I think they cover more aspects than gnome-terminal's does (which application to start - ie bash vs mc vs su - bash etc), and you can assign a default schema to a profile - and the profiles may be accessed easily from the session menu.

Finally, konsole has some features I haven't seen in other terminal emulators, like intelligent drag-and-drop. Yes, I said drag-and-drop. Like if you have a file manager window open, you can drag a directory to konsole and you are given a menu to either cd, ln, cp or mv the directory.

Different people want different things from terminal emulaters, but if you're already using the best unix desktop, konsole would be the better choice for many ;-).

memory usage

Posted Jun 5, 2004 15:25 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

mlterm supports multiple sessions with about third the memory footprint of konsole and with basically almost all of its features.

There's something I can't figure out, though: its memory usage doesn't seem to grow enough when I enlarge the size of the history: I changed the history size from 1000 to 8000 and ran a command to fill the buffer entirely.

ps u before:
tzafrir 30999 0.0 3.2 29564 15936 pts/16 S 18:25 0:01 konsole
and after:
tzafrir 30999 0.0 4.0 33104 19488 pts/16 S 18:25 0:02 konsole

memory usage

Posted Jun 7, 2004 0:18 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (2 responses)

How often is xterm's size really a problem anymore? On the list of programs I'm running, FireFox eats up 63M, Pan 21M, Perl 17M, djview 6M, a lost little swf_play process 3M. It's not coming close to hitting swap, and the 7 xterms aren't the first thing I would kill. When I swap, it's because I'm processing 30 megapixel images and the netpbm tools are taking up hundreds of MBs of memory. Unless I've got a lot of xterms open, 2 MB processes don't count.

Is 384 MB of memory really that rare these days? Does it really matter even on a system with less memory?

memory usage

Posted Jun 8, 2004 7:51 UTC (Tue) by KotH (guest, #4660) [Link] (1 responses)

Depends on where you live. In central Europe and the States, it's not
expensive to have a GB of memory (384MB is rather on the lower side ;)
I myself work with 768 (w/o any swap), at work i just got a box with
2.5GB.

But if you live in the second and third world, things are totaly different.
There, a PII is a power machine, 64MB is a lot and a 15" monitor is big.

Unfortunately, most OSS developers live in a region where hardware is
cheap, which means that they dont care whether an application wastes
a MB or not (you have plenty anyways). But this is actualy a problem
if you have to work with under 200MB of ram (had to feel that myself
when i had to use a little bit older laptop)

memory usage

Posted Jun 11, 2004 7:55 UTC (Fri) by leonid (guest, #4891) [Link]

History tends to repeat itself and hardware limitations are about to get back with Linux and other OSS software gaining mobile phones, PDAs and other such devices.