Stuart Ballard wrote:
> Charles Borner wrote:
>> After opening Mozilla, I go into GTop and notice that there are four (4)
>> instances of Mozilla running. All with identical amounts of memory
>> usage. Current usage on my machine as reported by GTop for all 4
>> instances combined is well over 400MB right now.
> While I agree that Mozilla does use far too much memory, you are
> misinterpreting the results of GTop.
> Mozilla is a multithreaded application, and under Linux each thread gets
> its own pid. So each thread appears in GTop as a separate instance of
> Mozilla. Not only that, but those threads *share* their memory usage -
> so while it's perfectly correct that each thread is using N Mb [1], they
> are the *same* N Mbs. Hence, the total memory usage for Mozilla is the
> amount listed for any one of those "instances".
> HTH,
> Stuart.
> [1] I'm guessing N=100 from your figures, although that still seems high
> based on my experience of Moz unless you've already done a lot of
> browsing (triggering some of Moz's known memory leaks) or scrolled
> through a large mail folder (which currently causes horrendous bloat, a
> known bug).
Stuart, thanks for the repsponse. Okay, thanks for informing me about
the effects of the multi-threading.
Okay, if that's the case, it's a failing within GTop then, since it's
reporting the shared memory space, but reporting it multiplied by the
number of threads currently active. As seen below.
http://www.evilnet.net/~chas/GTop1.jpg
http://www.evilnet.net/~chas/GTop2.jpg
Chas
