[ale] Linux desktop inefficiencies...

[Michael D. Hirsch]

John Wells wrote:

><rant>
>Is it just me, or are Gnome and KDE apps complete memory hogs?  I'm 
>trying to scrounge by on 256mb of memory under RH 9/Gnome, and man, is it 
>difficult.  Now, part of the problem is that I use java quite a bit, but 
>typically don't have more than one jvm going at a time.
>
>Apps you'd think would have relatively small footprint are huge, in my 
>opinion.  For example, running Gnome System Monitor consumes 9.2MB on my 
>system...why?  Why in the world would that consume so much memory?  It 
>makes no sense to me that the monitoring of network/cpu/memory should be 
>so consuming...
>
>Nautilus has always been a hog (8.2 currently...which seems to be an 
>improvement over past versions), gnome-panel at 12.2 MB, gnome-terminal at 
>13.3MB, gweather-applet-2 at 4.4MB...
>
>When I first installed RH 5.2 back in 99, I was able to run WindowMaker or 
>Afterstep with quite a few apps going in 16 megs of RAM.  I couldn't fit 
>RH9's big toe in that box.
>
>I don't run KDE, but I've heard from friends that it's essentially just as 
>bad...
>
>So what's the culprit?  Is it Gnome's reliance on Corba?  Is it poor 
>design of the toolkits themselves?  Is it the underlying X protocol? 
>I shudder to say this, but applications on Windows that do the equivalent 
>of many of the above have much smaller footprints and are more responsive 
>under heavy load.  
></rant>
>
>Don't get me wrong...I love linux, and I'm particularly home in 
>Gnome....but sometimes things just don't seem right.
>
>Anyone have any insight?

They tend to have a lot of features and link to libraries with a lot of 
features.  The good news is that after a certain point they are not 
supposed to grow in the total size used because they start sharing things.  
For instance, all your gnome apps use libgkt which is probably large, but 
it will only get loaded once.  Similarly for the corba supprot libraries.  
With themability, if an app uses standard icons, they will share them, 
too.

So each app may seem huge, but overall the memory footprint will only be 
quite large.  At least, that's the plan--I'm unconvinced that it really 
works terribly well.

Michael
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