gnome-terminal has a weight problem

[David Timms]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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/
Here is some top info from my system:
ps aux|grep terminal :
davidt    3827  2.5  2.6  40380 13608 ?        Sl   07:20   0:00 
gnome-terminal

top :
3827 davidt    15   0 40380  13m 9692 S  3.3  2.7   0:00.76 
gnome-terminal

And an article describing the terms VIRT RES SHR : {gentoo}
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=175419

DaveT.