On Tue, Jan 16, 2007, Oded Arbel wrote about "Re: Why are GNOME applications (and applets) take so much [EMAIL PROTECTED] memory ?": > I usually see a problem after about a week of usage - after a reboot it > behaves itself for a few days. I rebooted this morning, and now Evo is > down to 400MB.
With the mad race to get better and better hardware, it seems that people forgot how to write efficient software. One of the lost arts is preventing memory leaks. There are two kind of "memory-leak"-like problems in modern software: 1. Real memory leaks, where the program grows, and grows, and grows, the longer it runs. 2. The program not being able to shrink its memory use, and therefore each long-running program always takes the maximum amount of memory it needed up until now. (Every mathematician learned that sum(max(...)) > max(sum(...)), which is why this is such a serious problem when you're running many programs). I can, if I try very hard, understand why some clock applet should take 10 MB of memory (because it uses inefficient overly-general libraries, because it has translations into 100 different languages loaded into memory, or who knows what). What I can't understand is when the memory of such a program grows over time, forcing you to reboot every week (like you said). About a year ago, I discovered a memory leak in my favorite window manager, ctwm: I noticed that after several months (!) of continuous use, it used up a few megabytes more than it used initially. I bit of debugging (with a memory leak-finding tool that I wrote) turned out that ctwm leaked a few bytes of memory for every new window opened. After you open tens of thousands of windows over a few months, this adds up to a few megabytes. I reported the bug, and it was fixed. Contrast this to more "modern" software, which leaks megabytes *every day* (if not every hour), and nobody is even trying to do anything about it... Alas... -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Jan 16 2007, 26 Tevet 5767 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"A witty saying proves nothing." -- http://nadav.harel.org.il |Voltaire ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
