[OpenIndiana-discuss] X11 memory use

[Peter Tribble]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 5:29 PM, Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Is there anything that can be done to reduce the memory demands?  I'm
> using the nvidia server.
>

First profile it. Use xrestop

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xrestop/

to see what (if anything) is loading objects into the X server.

Something else that can make a significant difference with
modern graphics cards is that they often have multiple
visuals, and have to allocate memory for each one.


> With a single terminal window and Firefox running I have 162 MB of 1983 MB
> free.


That's good. it means the system is using most of the memory you paid
for. Free memory isn't a terribly useful diagnostic - it ought to be low
as you want the system to use as much memory as possible to avoid
hitting spinning rust. The real issue is whether the system is short of
memory and constantly needing to push for more or, worse, swapping.


>  The X server is consuming 350+ MB w/ Firefox and gnome consuming the
> rest. Having built and run X on SPARC 1+ systems, this seems a pretty sad
> state of affairs.  The memory consumption  and the performance are both
> much worse.
>

Indeed. However, usage patterns were massively different back then.
In particular, browsers started to load significant quantities of images
directly into the server, rather than updating the display themselves.
That largely eliminated X terminals as viable display devices, because
they rarely had more than just enough memory to hold the display
and a few fonts, and couldn't cope with hundreds of megabytes of
offscreen drawables.


> I don't want desktop icons, multiple desktops, decorative rectangles when
> I close a window, etc.  I'd prefer to run twm, but I'm pretty sure Firefox
> won't like that, so I haven't tried.
>

I'm not sure it would make that much difference. Unless you can
completely eliminate all of a given desktop environment, the first
app you run will load all the libraries. Once you have any part
of GNOME, you've mostly paid the memory tax.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/