ProposedPackages and memory usage

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

I noticed here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/ProposedPackages

This question:
"Why is Epiphany included above? Given the 'big fat warning' are there
not a few too many gnome dependencies in epiphany?"

And the answer is that compared to the currently included Firefox,
Epiphany both:
- Takes slightly less memory as it shares more with rest
  of the desktop (while still having the same Gecko HTML
  engine as Firefox).  In Edgy with the Ubuntu default page
  Epiphany takes 10MB and Firefox 12MB of private memory
  (report by kernel SMAPS feature)
- Better integrated to the desktop, for example see bug:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/106314


In general I'm wondering why people try so hard to avoid Gnome
dependencies?  I can understand why one wants as little of them
in the system processes that are run always (like session and
window managers, panel etc) because extra libs take more memory,
but not for binaries that users run less seldom.  For those I
would be more concerned about startup speed and speed in general.

And the memory usage in general should not be measured from
dependencies, but with actual data, e.g. with something like
the attached script[1].

Some notes on always running process from Ubuntu system:
- Firefox is of course the largest memory user
  (with a few open pages, ~50MB)
- perl system tools backend, takes 10MB private data
- gnome-session takes 7MB (+ several hundred KB from X server)
  and links >70 libraries...
- hpssd (using python) and hald take each almost 4MB
- mixer2 applet takes 3MB (most other applets take < 2MB)
- each bash session takes almost 2MB
- X server takes quite little as >90% of its memory usage
  comes from images Firefox has pushed to X server side
  (can be seen with "xrestop")

I hope to get similar data on Xubuntu Fawn during weekend
(depending on whether it installs to the 96MB RAM laptop :)).


	- Eero

[1] smaps is really great as it gives the information about how
much of the memory is private to the process (dirtied by the process
by writing it) whereas e.g. RSS number contains also the read-only
libraries paged into memory which are shared with all the other
processes using the those libraries.

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