Clock applet is more expensive than other clocks!

[Paul Johnson]

During the past weekend, when the problem with evolution-data-server
and gnome-panel existed, I could not get the gnome clock-applet to
run. I use WindowMaker as a window manager and there is an RPM in
Extras for a WindowMaker clock wmCalClock.  That's pretty nice, not so
beautiful as the old old afterstep clock that made me fall in love
with WindowMaker in 1998, but it does use anti-aliased fonts.  For fun
& comparison, I compiled the newest version of wmclock that I could
find (from 2001, I think).

Now the gnome clock is back, and just for fun I compared the cost of
the  clocks.  If I'm reading this ps output correctly, the gnome
clock-applet uses almost 1% of 1gig system memory and it uses 9x as
much as the wmCalClock or wmclock.  Am I reading this right?

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
pauljohn  2521     0.0      0.1     3124  1296 ?        Ss   08:44
0:00 wmCalClock
pauljohn  2528     0.0      0.9    25684  9624 ?        S    08:44
0:00 /usr/libexec/clock-applet
--oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_ClockApplet_Factory --oaf-ior-fd=39
pauljohn  3026    0.0       0.1     2888  1160 pts/1    S    08:56
0:00 wmclock

The cost of running the gnome clock-applet is probably higher than
this, howerver, because it is eating resources out of the CORBA
server, right?

In case you wondered why your linux system is using 500meg of RAM
while while doing "nothing", this is part of the answer.  Your clock
is using 10 meg of RAM.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas