Extreme memory usage for gnome-panel related apps

[Jon Nettleton]

On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 13:58 +0000, Adam Huffman wrote:
> On Sat, 01 Dec 2007, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 22:11 +0000, Martin Ebourne wrote:
> > > I agree with you completely about the memory usage of Fedora 8, it has 
> > > got VERY bloated recently.
> > 
> > I remember when I popped 512mb into my system back around 2002. Was
> > running Red Hat 8 as I recall. I never, ever got the thing to use more
> > than half of it. No matter how many tabs I opened in Mozilla, no matter
> > how many kernels I compiled, I had a good 256mb worth of disk cache at
> > all times, and it never hit swap. I remember losing entire 100mb files
> > because that machine was a bit flaky and would hang sometimes, with the
> > file never being written to disk. I got into a habit of typing 'sync' a
> > few times after doing anything important, a habit I still have to this
> > day.
> > 
> > So now I'm sitting on a laptop with 512mb, running Fedora 8. I'm running
> > Galeon and Evolution, and they're eating up 304M RAM and 428M swap.
> > 
> 
> I recently upgraded a 3 1/2 year old laptop with 512MiB to Fedora 8 and
> the level of memory usage when running nothing but Firefox seemed to
> cause frequent stalls when it was completely unresponsive for 30 seconds
> at a time.
> 
> Admittedly this is only anecdotal evidence, but this doesn't happen on a
> newer one with 2GiB.

Thank you guys for jogging my memory.  Can you please try adding these
lines to your sysctl.conf and reboot.

vm.swappiness = 40
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 120

I was forced down to 512 on my laptop while I am getting my 1GB chip
replaced and saw the same problem as you.  Currently I am running
metacity with compositing, avant-window-navigator, epiphany, evolution,
xchat-gnome, pidgin, a couple of gnome-terminals, pida and this is my
output from free.

             total       used       free     shared    buffers
cached
Mem:        450192     444532       5660          0        884
97688
-/+ buffers/cache:     345960     104232
Swap:      1933304      94372    1838932


I actually only have 450MB of memory because the rest is used for my IGP
video memory.  Just to be consistent here is also my output from
ps_mem.py

  4.5 MiB +   5.1 MiB =   9.6 MiB       metacity
  3.4 MiB +   7.9 MiB =  11.3 MiB       avant-window-navigator
  4.3 MiB +   8.1 MiB =  12.4 MiB       gnome-terminal
  3.6 MiB +   9.5 MiB =  13.2 MiB       mixer_applet2
  4.1 MiB +   9.9 MiB =  14.0 MiB       gweather-applet-2
  6.0 MiB +   9.6 MiB =  15.6 MiB       python (2)
  5.5 MiB +  10.8 MiB =  16.2 MiB       xchat-gnome
  6.8 MiB +  10.4 MiB =  17.2 MiB       gnome-panel
  8.8 MiB +   8.8 MiB =  17.6 MiB       nautilus
  9.1 MiB +  12.3 MiB =  21.4 MiB       intlclock-applet
 10.6 MiB +  11.9 MiB =  22.5 MiB       pidgin
 16.5 MiB +   8.7 MiB =  25.2 MiB       tomboy
 63.3 MiB +  14.7 MiB =  78.0 MiB       epiphany
 83.0 MiB +  16.6 MiB =  99.5 MiB       evolution


If that doesn't help e-mail me offline because I would love to work with
you to find the difference between my setup and yours.

Jon