Hello Oded, people...
Few weeks ago, I worked temporarily at a small company, and they gave
me a PC which was with Athlon XP (if I recall it was 1.6 Ghz or
something) with 756MB RAM to work with.
So, I installed CentOS 4.4, upgraded my KDE 3.5.5, and upgraded
OpenOffice to the latest one, and used FireFox 2 for browsing. I
started to work.
I started to use OpenOffice to write a small spreadshot. BOY was it
slow as hell! it was so slow that I was almost sure I had some Pentium
2 300Mhz processor.
Switching apps (using ALT TAB) was a PITA. I have not been running
many applications: Twinkle, Kopete, FireFox, KMail, OO, and Konsole.
Nothing more. The machine was crawling.
I took Office 2003 from the Windows team, installed Crossover 6 (the
latest version finally solves the flickering flash bug), and started
to use Office 2003. Finally I could write somthing without the machine
being crawling, but opening few more tabs in FF 2, and the machine
crawled again..
My opinion: Some serious debate needs to be occured, whether in
slashdor or the mailing lists, some sort of "shake up" in the
GNOME/KDE development community, to remind them that this situation
cannot be continue, and some diet is required.
I heard my advocates who recommend people to switch to Linux and use
KDE or GNOME with 256MB RAM. To them I can say HA HA! go ahead, fire
the latest GNOME and open 2-3 apps and give the machine a minute or
so, it will be almost unresponsive. It's better in KDE but not by
much. If someone wants something speedy, they should look at using
FVWM, flux box or any other "lite" window manager and use some
independent applications. I used FVWM with Kopete and KMAIL and
Konqueror, and the results were pretty good on a 192MB machine. I
tried to switch to GNOME (yes, stupid decision) and I had to reset the
machine in order to get my control back.
Today, everyone is laughing/amazed by the hardware requirement of
Windows VISTA (specially with Aero Glass interface). Well, my friends,
at this pace, GNOME (and maybe even KDE) is going at this way, with
all the latest GLX eye-candy, and the hefty memory requirements. I do
not know the future, but I do remember KDE usage only few years ago
with a Pentium 4 1.7Ghz, 512MB RAM, and it was very usable and
enjoyable.
Thanks,
Hetz
On 1/16/07, Oded Arbel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
And can something be done about it ??
Just as an example at how ludicrous the situation is (and the reason
that my relatively powerful laptop is grinding to a halt at the most
opportune times of the day), disregarding the things that need to be
big, such as Evolution which I'm willing to let go at the moment
although it does take up 1 - 1.5GB of virtual memory, here is the list
of the things that I don't understand:
PID USER PRI NI VIRT RES SHR S CPU% MEM% TIME+ Command
2994 root 15 0 241M 40512 10032 S 2.0 1.1
2h23:59 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -br -audit 0 -auth /var/gdm/:0.X
X is here for reference - it takes up ~200 - 250MB of virtual and it has
the excuse that it needs to be big. lets look at the stuff that take
about the same amount of virtual:
3170 odeda 18 0 204M 17932 6556 S 0.0 0.5 3:52.88 nautilus
--sm-config-prefix /nautilus-wyDKQV/ --s
Nautilus at idle - I don't have any file manager window open and I'm not
copying or doing any file operation that requires nautilus - it just
needs to draw the desktop when I have it exposed (which is not that
often, I like to work with maximized windows and use a lot of
workspaces). Still it takes almost as much virt as X does.
3166 odeda 18 0 186M 23408 10932 S 0.0 0.6 1:20.29
gnome-panel --sm-config-prefix /gnome-panel-IoBUz
The panel is kept busy on my system with quite a lot of applets - but it
still is no excuse for 186MB of memory, mainly as applets are
out-of-process and counted separately.. lets look at what applets are
doing:
3310 odeda 16 0 181M 32696 4344 S 0.0 0.9
5:55.44 /usr/libexec/netspeed_applet2 --oaf-activate-iid=
The network monitoring applet - shows a small box with the amount of
bytes being passed through the interface at the moment. It also graphs
network history for the last 5 minutes or so - still it uses 180MB,
almost 20% of my total dynamic memory. I cringe to think about what
people with 512MB memory do.
3490 odeda 15 0 131M 7308 5456 S 0.0 0.2 0:26.75
mono /usr/lib/tomboy/Tomboy.exe --panel-applet --
Note taking application. written in mono, so I'll let it go.
3327 odeda 15 0 120M 5336 4504 S 0.0 0.1
0:01.03 /usr/libexec/trashapplet --oaf-activate-iid=OAFII
The trash applet ? its a frigging two-state icon, with a tooltip that
counts the number of items in the trash folder - why does it need 120MB
of memory ??
3307 odeda 15 0 115M 6188 4612 S 0.0 0.2
0:55.20 /usr/libexec/gnome-netstatus-applet --oaf-activat
Here's another network applet - this one shows wireless signal. Unlike
its brother, this one doesn't have a history - I guess that's why it
only takes 115MB of memory !!
I took a snapshot of this right after my system wasn't responding and I
had to ssh from another computer and kill some processes before I
managed to get in, so this doesn't list some other stuff which eats a
lot of memory, such as the sensor applet (~180MB), the task bar applet
(~150MB !!) and gaim - which is a nice IM and all, but shouldn't take
close to 300MB of memory.
Just for comparison, I also use some KDE apps (that are written in
bloated C++, right ?):
Amarok (fully loaded with about 3GB of music to monitor): ~200MB
Kopete (under same conditions as GAIM): ~70MB
Kmail (under same conditions as evo above): ~110MB
Basket (a note taking application - here as a comparison with GNOME
applets - its not an applet, but it is constantly running and has a
rather complex UI and carries more data for me then tomboy above): ~40MB
Now before you go all "its only virtual, who cares", I'll have you know
that my OS is set up with 2GB of swap for 1GB of dynamic memory, which I
always thought was good enough for almost everything, and still - when I
have firefox, evolution, some text editors and maybe some file manager
windows (in additions to the stuff I always keep running, of course)
switching is a pain. If I want to add a serious IDE to the mix, I know
I'm risking it. And every so often - about twice a week - I get a system
that is so unresponsive due to swap thrashing (if I log in remotely I
can see swap at 100% and kswapd taking up all the resources), that I
have to kill X just to gain control over it.
Except for switching back to KDE - any idea what I can about this ?
--
Oded
::..
"Chaos is but unperceived order."
-- Fred Hoyle
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