Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps

[Martin Ebourne]

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:34:09 +0100, Mark wrote:
> i was just looking through the system monitor to see how my memory usage
> was doing and that gave me a impressive (negative way) result. I've made
> a screenshot [1] of it and edited it a little.
> ...
> Now the notebook i'm typing this on has 1GB om memory and runs Fedora
> fine so if i look at it that way than the ram usage is fine. but keep in
> mind the people with less memory (256 or 512 MB's) they are gonna get a
> hard time with this fedora. My total memory usage at the time of this
> writing is: 432.00 MB (with GIMP on.. if that's closed than it's "just"
> 400 MB).
> 
> What i'm trying to say here is that those gnome-panel applets are taking
> up way to much memory regardless of the memory you can afford or have in
> your computer.
> ...
> So.. is something gonna change with this memory abuse?
> , 
> [1]
> http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6821/screenshotsystemmonitoryh4.png

I agree with you completely about the memory usage of Fedora 8, it has 
got VERY bloated recently.

This laptop is x86_64 and has 1GB RAM. Up to and including FC6 this was 
fine and it hardly ever reached the limit, performance was always good. 
Starting with Fedora 7, and really much more obvious now with Fedora 8 
I'm finding it's using far too much RAM and regularly hitting swap very 
badly. Performance has suffered considerably. I've been thinking of 
shelling out some cash on 2x 1GB SODIMMs, but unfortunately these DDR1 
versions are very expensive.

As an example, there's two users logged in at the moment, I'm running 
evolution, galeon, and an xterm. The other login has nothing extra 
running, it's just gnome.

Here is the output of free:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1027656    1008372      19284          0      43276     135564
-/+ buffers/cache:     829532     198124
Swap:      1048568         48    1048520

Yes, 810MB of memory really in use. I'm running gdesklets but not running 
other new stuff such as NetworkManager, yum applets, compiz etc. This 
level of memory use feels quite excessive.

Unfortunately determining where RAM has gone is still somewhat difficult 
on Linux. It would be great to have Matt Mackall's patches in, or Exmap 
available. The best I've found without having to patch the kernel is:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py

Running this as root, the biggest culprits are:

 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program 
  3.4 MiB +   7.6 MiB =  11.0 MiB       notification-area-applet (2)
 10.6 MiB +   1.8 MiB =  12.4 MiB       gconfd-2 (2)
 11.8 MiB +   1.3 MiB =  13.1 MiB       bbackupd
  4.4 MiB +   9.4 MiB =  13.8 MiB       evolution-alarm-notify (2)
  5.3 MiB +   8.9 MiB =  14.2 MiB       mail-notification (2)
  4.7 MiB +   9.7 MiB =  14.4 MiB       metacity (2)
  8.2 MiB +   7.5 MiB =  15.7 MiB       gnome-power-manager (2)
  4.1 MiB +  11.6 MiB =  15.7 MiB       padevchooser
 15.3 MiB + 556.0 KiB =  15.8 MiB       restorecond
 14.5 MiB +   1.6 MiB =  16.1 MiB       xterm
  6.0 MiB +  10.3 MiB =  16.3 MiB       notification-daemon (2)
  6.0 MiB +  11.7 MiB =  17.7 MiB       wnck-applet (2)
  6.1 MiB +  11.7 MiB =  17.8 MiB       clock-applet (2)
  8.8 MiB +  12.5 MiB =  21.3 MiB       mixer_applet2 (2)
 11.0 MiB +  13.4 MiB =  24.5 MiB       gnome-panel (2)
 13.9 MiB +  15.7 MiB =  29.7 MiB       /usr/libexec/re
 23.0 MiB +   9.0 MiB =  31.9 MiB       gnome-settings-daemon (2)
 21.5 MiB +  15.8 MiB =  37.3 MiB       nautilus (2)
 23.9 MiB +  18.0 MiB =  41.9 MiB       evolution
 30.3 MiB +  13.2 MiB =  43.5 MiB       /usr/bin/sealer (2)
 34.7 MiB +  14.7 MiB =  49.5 MiB       deskbar-applet
 43.1 MiB +   8.5 MiB =  51.7 MiB       beagled (2)
 50.8 MiB +  10.4 MiB =  61.2 MiB       Xorg (2)
 80.2 MiB +  12.7 MiB =  92.9 MiB       python (4)
 80.6 MiB +  16.1 MiB =  96.7 MiB       galeon

Galeon seems a bit heavy at 80M for a few tabs, but mozilla based browers 
aren't renowned for being light.

What really stands out for me here is deskbar-applet, how can that be 
using all that memory? Also sealert and beagled are very excessive.

To verify the numbers above I killed these tasks off and checked the 
reduction in used space (- buffers). The expectation is to see the 
private memory returned, and that's almost exactly what I got:

1 x deskbar-applet  35MB
2 x beagled         44MB
2 x sealert         32MB

Over 100MB returned by removing a few almost never used programs, but I'm 
still at 698MB, which is still way too much.

Looking back up that list there's many other things that are using too 
much memory. How does a clock applet use over 6MB of private memory?

Cheers,

Martin.