Memory-usage in a modern OS is complicated, as many people on this list have already shown. While most users will cry "memory leak" and give out incorrect observations (and power-users can often get very technical speaking about something they don't thoroughly understand), their complaints do reflect a problem.
That's why, in the recent year, memory consumption and performance problems have generated a lot of developer interest in the GNOME circles, as you could see by following the Planet GNOME (http://planet.gnome.org). You can also check Federico Mena Quintero's blog ( http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news.html) for some of his notes about performance work he's been doing, if you wish to get a (developer-oriented) picture of whatever causes those things. One popular memory bug is constants which are not placed in readonly-segments in shared libraries: this causes this memory to be spent for every process linking in this library. Here you might find some more info: http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction The recent Linux kernels (>2.6.114) added 'smaps' per-process data [2] which allows you to find out how much RSS the shared libraries are using, and thus to subtract them from the process' own RSS (its' executable data + heap). Read more about it here: http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2006/03/memory-usage-with-smaps.html Really, there are encouraging news on that front, but the general answer to Free Software woes remains: if you want to get something done, join the effort. On 1/16/07, Oded Arbel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
And can something be done about it ??
