[Gllug] Re: Memory usage

[Peter Grandi]

>>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 07:26:57 +0100, Peter Childs
>>> <peterachilds at gmail.com> said:

>> [ ... ] what was using all my memory and either fix what I
>> think might be a long term memory leak of some sort, [ ... ]

peterachilds> [ ... ] I've just tried ps -FA --sort resident

Recent versions of 'top' or 'htop' allow changing the sort
column with "<" and ">". Other recent commands for 'top' like
"Z", "B", "c", "x", "y" and "W" to save them as defaults make
recent version of 'top' pretty good to see visually what's going
on at a glance. 'htop' sort of comes with all those already
enabled.

peterachilds> and discovered that openoffice is a proabable
peterachilds> cause as it seamed to be taking up about 1/3 of my
peterachilds> memory after only one night in usage. I'm going to
peterachilds> try doing somthing about this bloatware but I'm
peterachilds> not currently sure what.

Well, OOo is a lot less bloatware than some complain about (here
OOo 1.1.5 starts in 10-12 seconds from cold and 2-3 seconds if
it is already a bit cached, and this is a pretty low end PC).
It is rather that a lot of other stuff is poorly thought out
and/or has unhelpful defaults.

Moreover it is not so much the amount of memory, but the
locality and consequent swapping issue that are important.

So, I have spent some time especially in the past few weeks
looking at various memory usage and pressure issues, and my
current suggestions are more or less in these blog entries
(and many others in the recent past):

  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/Notes/anno05-4th.html#051008

Tweaking these parameters may also help:

  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/Notes/anno05-3rd.html#050919

Other possibly interestin entries:

  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/Notes/anno05-3rd.html#050701
  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/Notes/anno05-2nd.html#050512

Also, my KDE performance improvements notes:

  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/Notes/linuxKDE.html#performance

are usually generally applicable. In particular it seems many
people do not fully appreciate how expensive it is to have
FontConfig/Xft2 with many fonts and antialiasing.

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