seed changes

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

On Monday 11 February 2008, Jérôme Guelfucci wrote:
> For xscreensaver, I don't know, for me it consummes the half of what
> gnome-screensaver consumes in RAM

How did you arrive at this conclusion i.e. what numbers[1] you compared
and from where?

Were you using comparable configurations of both; same (X)Ubuntu version, 
desktop, screensaver "plugin" etc?


[1] developers who don't know how Linux (and most modern operating
      systems) memory management work usually get this completely wrong.

"Writable" field in gnome-system-monitor is a valid way to compare
real memory usage of applications (if you don't see it, you can enable
it from g-s-m options).  About everything else is misleading (e.g. Size)
and / or affected by how much memory *other* processes take (e.g. RSS
and Shared).


	- Eero

PS. Those who assume that "Size" in 'top' tells something about process
memory usage could wonder a bit about a process I once noticed.  Its memory
size was over 2 *GB* on a system with only 128 MB of RAM and no swap. :-)

Explanation for that was that it wasn't joining the exiting threads it had
started as joinable.  As a result it was leaking 8MB thread stacks
(resources) of which it had used only 4KB from each...