[OpenIndiana-discuss] X11 memory use

[Reginald Beardsley]

In general I would agree, but in this case I use a dual core Atom w/ 2 GB of DRAM for my internet access.    Increasing the memory is not an option as it is maxed out.  My main system no longer connects to the internet and this is a compromise to minimize the power consumption entailed in running two systems.

FWIW X was a memory hog even 20 years ago.  I suspect much of the memory consumption now is the tables of function pointers needed to implement objects.  As the class structures get more elaborate, the memory consumed grows at an astonishing rate.  Foolish caching policies just make a bad situation worse.  And never underestimate the damage  a programmer can cause using a poorly designed library.  I've seen N panels drawn on screen by drawing one, clearing it, drawing two, clearing both, drawing three, etc until N panels have been drawn.  This was done by people who were regarded as experts and paid accordingly. 


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On Mon, 12/9/13, Udo Grabowski (IMK) <udo.grabowski at kit.edu> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] X11 memory use
 To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
 Date: Monday, December 9, 2013, 11:39 AM
 
 On 09/12/2013 18:29, Reginald
 Beardsley wrote:
 > Is there anything that can be done to reduce the memory
 demands?  I'm using the nvidia server.
 > With a single terminal window and Firefox running I
 have 162 MB of 1983 MB free.
 > The X server is consuming 350+ MB w/ Firefox and gnome
 consuming the rest.
 
 Firefox and Thunderbird are know memory hogs, I don't know
 why
 they want to cache all and everything (performance ?), but,
 compared
 to my old mosaic browser, it's unbelievably much for simple
 html
 pages....
 And, of course, every picture firefox generates and caches
 is also
 cached in Xorg...
 But, compared to other memory hogs (why does a simple clock
 need
 40+MB ???), they can even be called memory-efficient....
 
 Seriously, today's desktops come with 12 GB or more, so I
 don't
 think there's a serious to dig into that deeply. Ram is
 cheap,
 so buy some.
 -- Dr.Udo Grabowski    Inst.f.Meteorology
 a.Climate Research IMK-ASF-SAT
 www.imk-asf.kit.edu/english/sat.php
 KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology     
       http://www.kit.edu
 Postfach 3640,76021 Karlsruhe,Germany  T:(+49)721
 608-26026 F:-926026
 
 
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