[ale] Linux desktop inefficiencies...

[John Wells]

Joseph Knapka said:
> I suspect that it has more to do with the proliferation of
> dependencies. Anything dependent on Gnome, for example, is going to link
> with all the Gnome shared objects (== vast amount of code
> space). And those libraries depend on Glibc and a bunch of other
> stuff, and so forth.  The people who write code these days (Windows
> people as well as OSS) simply don't care that much about resourc
> usage; we're all jaded and assume Moore's Law will bail us out of any
> resource pits we happen to fall into. So we use whatever libraries do
> what we need, without fussing much about the cost at runtime (or the ire
> of folks who want to install our stuff and find eighteen pages worth of
> dependencies).

Very true, to an extent.  As a systems analyst, I still make decisions
based on efficiency every day, and take great care to make sure my
applications only use/link/include exactly what they need.

However, when under time constraints/pressure from management, I've been
known to take the quick thoughtless route.  And, of course, one can't
spend time learning every detail about a particular library or piece of
code to find out what can be excluded....still, certain decisions are just
logical.

> Furthermore, note the following:
>
> (2) When your executables are ELF (which they are), the values for RSS
> and SIZE of a process *include* any libraries used by the exe, even
> though (a) those libs are almost cerainly shared amongst many
> processes, and (b) only pages of an exe or lib that are actually
> accessed contribute to the real memory footprint of a process (of
> course, RSS only counts pages that are present in RAM, but it still
> neglects sharing);
>
> (3) The computation of process size for ELF executables is documented to
> be broken (in the top man page, but not the ps one).

Thanks very much for this useful information.  So, at this point, it shows
me two things: one, that I know the machine is dragging quite a bit, and
two, that I have no idea how much memory is truly being consumed, and by
what, so I can't be absolutely sure that memory is the culprit (although
I'd wager top provides a reasonably close figure).

Is there any way to get an accurate idea of how much memory a particular
process (ELF) is consuming?

Thanks guys!

John


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