Is there a memory bloat issue with ubuntu library compilation?

[Miravlix]

On lør, 2004-11-06 at 11:24 -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> This is ubuntu-users material, so following up there.

We don't quite agree on that, setting the right compiler options is
development in my book.

> A good rule of thumb for memory management on Linux systems is to start to
> worry about memory usage when you find that programs you want to use are
> paged out to disk.  You can't determine very much about actual memory
> consumption from the numbers that ps or top give you.

I still remember using DOS before Windows was invented and the annoying
bloatware started. Back when everyone could do magic in 640K memory, now
we use 10 MB to open a telnet session.

I know very well we can't do a byte for byte compare of memory usage,
since lots of it is libraries, but comparing the memory usage of two
Linux systems where the difference is in compiler flags does give an
indication that something might be wrong.

The example of Firefox using 41MB memory on Gentoo/Slackware systems
compared to ubuntu's 89MB thats is too big a difference to be ignored,
because it indicate that our base libraries is using 50% more memory and
for no reason at all.

Even if memory isn't used by programs, it is always used by caching in
Linux and that cache works extremely well in improving system
performance.

I really think it's worth investigation whatever we can reduce the base
systems memory usage and I really don't agree with your attitude towards
it at all, but I'm not 100% sure that it is bloat, as you mentioned
yourself analyzing memory usage on a Linux system is a black art, so I
was hoping someone with the technical know how, could explain whatever
there is a technical reason for the memory usage difference.

-- 
Miravlix <dragon at lix-world.net>
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