[dapper] Memory and CPU usage

[Anthony David]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 04:20:41PM +1100, Sasha Tsykin wrote:
> I've checked both ksysguard and the gnome system monitor. When running 
> side by side, they give different results. They show the same 
> application using radically different amounts of memory (eg. 
> gnome-system monitor shows mozilla-thunderbird-bin using 62.7MiB but 
> ksysguard shows it using ~265MiB). Also, ksysguard which is the only one 
> of the two which reports CPU utilization reports almost all my 
> applications using 0% of my CPU. These glitches are bizarre and it's 
> quite important for me to know how my system is performing in 
> quantitative terms, which is impossible because of the glitches outlined 
> above. The only time they agree is when some application starts to go 
> rogue and use 100% of my CPU for no apparent reason. Even then they 
> don't agree on the amount of memory it is using, and the CPU utilization 
> ranges from 5% to 10% in ksysguard. I know that application is causing 
> the problem because the moment I kill it the problem goes away. This is 
> a major issue. I would like to know which one I should trust (if either) 
> and if possible, how to fix the problem.

I haven't used either of these tools, but they may be reporting different
memory figures (working set size vs total virtual memory used). Try using
the top command in a shell. That clearly by default breaks up the memory used
and should show you what mozilla-thinderbird-bin is using.

Performance of many email clients is inversely proportional to the size of
the inbox. Is your's large?

Regards

-- 
Anthony David

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