gnome-terminal has a weight problem

[David Malcolm]

On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 19:57 +0000, 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/
> 
Would it be possible to get this into the next release of
gnome-system-monitor?