HUGE Virtual Memory Usage

[James Livingston]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 11:37 -0400, Matt Patterson wrote:
> I was just wondering if this is a normal thing. I have a machine with 
> 768 megs ram, but the VM numbers given by System Monitor seem 
> outrageous. Right now in the VM column I see:
> 
> firefox-bin    232.1 mb
> soffice.bin    208.8 mb
> nautilus         176.7 mb
> gnome-vfs-daemon   52.7 mb
> gnome-terminal      50.7 mb
> X     220.4 mb
> mozilla-thunderbird   152.2 mb
> vmware-vmx   317.3

The VM size of an application isn't how much memory it is using, it is
the size of it's address space. What this means is that the size of a
shared library will be included in the VM size of every application that
uses it, even though there will only be one copy in memory.

On okay approximation of "how much memory is an app using" is (RSS -
Shared). That isn't an exact figure, because it's hard to define exactly
what is meant by "how much memory is an app using?".


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and
wrong. -- H. L. Mencken

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20051007/b4beb9ff/attachment.sig>