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Re: [LUG] Out of memory )-:

 

On Fri, 6 Sep 2013, Tom wrote:

On 06/09/13 12:21, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Fri, 6 Sep 2013, Tom wrote:

On 06/09/13 11:27, Gordon Henderson wrote:

Well, not quite, but what's it doing!!!

top - 11:19:05 up 6 days, 14:36, 2 users, load average: 0.08, 0.26, 0.22
Tasks: 175 total,   2 running, 171 sleeping,   2 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 2.3 us, 2.7 sy, 0.1 ni, 95.0 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem:   3831912 total,  3509196 used,   322716 free, 271272 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free, 890016 cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 13071 gordon 20 0 1898m 1.3g 14m S 6.7 35.5 414:59.27 gnome-shell
 5369 gordon    20   0 1018m 393m  23m S   6.3 10.5 209:48.38 firefox
30282 gordon    20   0  570m 356m  17m S   0.0  9.5   2:20.91 Fritzing
25137 gordon    20   0  247m  30m 6240 S   0.0  0.8   2:11.95 soffice.bin
 3489 root      20   0 97756  27m  14m S   1.0  0.7 104:51.99 Xorg
 4011 gordon    20   0  298m  20m 5328 R   1.0  0.6  18:42.48 xchat

So much bloat - all for some nice eye-candy )-: 1.8GB of RAM used for what?

Gordon

Is it not this wonderful caching thing - pages are cached and loaded into ram on startup if theres room.
Mind you it is hard to get it small.

There is caching going on -yes, that's generally good, but for one program to reach 1.8GB of in-core memory is just ridiculous.

Gordon

Is it causing trouble? I'd agree it does seem a lot - probably almost as much as a small Word document being read on windows but is it actually a problem for most people? If all, as most people do, you just browse and e-mail a fast as possible browser is nice. I do some programming from time to time and, while I've only got 2GB on here I dont get any noticeable problems while either programming or browsing even though a lot of swap is used.

You're right. It's not a problem. Today.

However I've been watching it grow daily since I started to use Gnome3 and it's not stabilising, nor is it going down. I envisage having to reboot (or restart Gnome) in a few days time.

I don't want to do that as (from what I can gather) there is as-yet no way to save my desktop. I do not want to get into the habit of having to reboot daily like the MS Windows people do, then waste 10 minutes (or more) getting things back the way they were.

Firefox I can (and do) restart. It does have a handy restore previous session feature (it's under the History pull-down if you've never used it)

But I fear that this is symptomatic of sloppy programming in general - it's memory leaks and bloat for no good reason at all. All that memory for the program to search through - it all adds up. Why does it need it? What is it doing?

I project I did recently involved 4K of flash, 256 bytes of ram and I was happy to come in under-budget (still have about 1K of flash left - what can I use it for!!!) Lets force some of the bloatware kiddies of today to write something usefull for a microcontroller for a change. Or force them all to use Raspberry Pi's...

But I do not think that what I have running now is at all "power user" either. I push the windows key and I have 8 virtual screens on the right - I used run run 9 on xfce and fvwm, each with lots of xterms in them and the big hog then was firefox - now it's the window manager.

The first Unix box I used had 128K bytes of core memory and it supported 6 users easilly - sure, they were using glass teletypes and not a GUI, but for editing, C & Pascal compiling it seemed to be enough. Programs were smaller then, I guess.

Its not like the good old days when you spent a couple of weeks converting the BCD code to binary.

I've never done that - anyway, I'd write a program if I had to.

Gordon


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