Auto-launching of applications

[Michael Vogt]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 02:13:36PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> [Is this the best place to provide feedback such as this, or would you like
> comments directed somewhere else, e.g., ubuntu-desktop@ or Launchpad?]
> 
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:14:45AM +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > > Apparently the window is supposed to open in the background, but I think
> > > that users may wonder why a program is seemingly running without them
> > > wanting it to.
> 
> > > Also, I'm sure I'm not the only person who doesn't use update-manager.
> 
> > > Can anyone explain to me why autolaunching programs is a good idea?
> 
> > update-notifier has always auto-launched, as long as it has existed in
> > Ubuntu. The only thing that has changed in Jaunty is how it presents
> > updates, when there are any. Instead of displaying an icon with a bubble
> > pointing at it inviting you to click it to show the available updates,
> > it shows the available updates directly.
> 
> Minor nit here; in the past update-notifier has always been present and
> running in the background, displaying an icon as needed.  update-notifier
> takes up about 20MB of memory on my amd64 system to fulfill this function.
> The new behavior launches update-manager, which is a much more involved
> program that takes up over 100MB when it's launched.  I know this is small
> potatoes compared to, say, firefox, but I think we should be aware of these
> costs since in aggregate they can certainly be an issue.
[..]
 
I agree that update-manager is substantially heavier in resource usage
(mem/cpu) than update-notifier. The later was written with efficiency
and low memory use in mind. But the memory use you cite does include
all shared libs and all mmaped stuff. So the numbers sound a lot
scarier then they actually are. But still update-manager needs a lot
more than update-notifier (by design).

Cheers,
 Michael