gnome-terminal has a weight problem
Daniel P. Berrange
berrange at redhat.com
Tue Nov 28 19:57:24 UTC 2006
On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 12:41:56PM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Ever since I updated to post-FC6 rawhide on my x86-64 system,
> gnome-terminal has been unreliable. It occasionally crashes, often at
> strange times. I put it into Bugzilla
> (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=217378) but have
> not heard any more - how dare people not fix my bug (for free) within 24
> hours?!? :)
>
> I am curious, though, as to whether I'm really the only one who sees
> this. The problem appears to be related to a memory leak. A quick ps
> on my system shows:
>
> corbet 14974 0.0 5.4 333732 55532 ? Ssl Nov27 0:13 gnome-terminal
>
> A 300MB address space (50MB resident) is a bit on the hefty side, even
> considering that we're talking about a GNOME application here. Doing
> the same thing an hour later shows this:
>
> corbet 14974 0.0 5.0 341236 52032 ? Ssl Nov27 0:14 gnome-terminal
>
> Whereas when I put in the BZ entry I had this:
>
> corbet 14974 0.0 2.3 295520 24288 ? Rsl 07:54 0:02 gnome-terminal
>
> In other words, the thing is growing at a fast and steady rate.
>
> Personally, I think that a terminal emulator should know its place, and
> gnome-terminal has failed to keep within its bounds. Is this something
> special it's doing for me, or is it a wider problem?
The memory usage reported by 'ps' or 'top' is essentially /useless/ as a
source of information about how much memory is actually used by a program.
On x86_64 in particular, libraries are mapped into memory on very coarse
granularity, but the actual usage is nowhere near the map size. A freshly
launched gnome-terminal on i386 has a mapped size of 49 MB, while x86_64
it is 430 MB. The actual resident size though is ~20 MB on i386, or 30 MB
on x86_64, which is pretty reasonable - particularly when you then look
at how much of this is shared vs private mappings.
The size of private mappings in gnome-terminal appears to be principally
related to number of tabs / windows open & the scrollback size.
Anyway if you want to examine actual memory maps / usage to get some real
memory figures look at /proc/[PID]/smaps rather tha top/ps. That file's
rather unpleasent to read, so its useful to post-process it
http://people.redhat.com/berrange/mem-monitor/
Regards,
Dan.
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