[PD] linux - faster load first time

Andy Farnell padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Fri Oct 5 06:50:41 CEST 2007




I use fluxbox WM, no hassle, no fancy bollocks. It's just
X with some coloured window bars and a program launcher menu.

The MS Windows philosophy seriously subverted peoples expectations
and understanding of what an "Operating System" and "Desktop" are.
MS Windows and its imitators are not *operating systems* they are 
background application suites that burn energy running pointless tat
you don't really need. I don't want spinning windows and dancing monkeys,
if I wanted that I'd take drugs.

On Thu, 4 Oct 2007 11:56:43 -0400 (EDT)
Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Kevin McCoy wrote:
> 
> > I notice this not only on Pd but on most programs... gnome-terminal
> > eventually starting taking so long to start up the first couple of times
> > that I gave up and started with xterm, for example.  Firefox takes a long
> > time as well and I am using that every day...
> 
> Last time that I was having huge slowdowns, I looked at "top" by CPU 
> usage, and it was showing a program called "hal" sucking 100% cpu all of 
> the time and keeping the cpu hot.
> 
> (without any special priorities, in that case, one other program trying 
> to get 100% will only get 50%, because cpu is shared equally)
> 
> gnome-terminal is an utter waste of RAM, but most people have plenty of 
> RAM to waste. "top" now says it has 100 megs virtual RAM of which 9 megs 
> are shared RAM, so I might be led to think that it's really taking 91 
> megs, but that is false. Say that the process id is 5262; then open the 
> pseudo-file /proc/5262/maps as plain text. I have:
> 
>    08089000-090c3000 rw-p 08089000 00:00 0          [heap]
> 
> Which is the main chunk of process-specific memory. The size is not 
> written but you may compute it like this using bash:
> 
>    echo $(( 0x090c3000-0x08089000 ))
> 
> and then it says 17014784, which is about 16.2 megs of RAM, only. It's a 
> lot more RAM than what the scrollback buffers would warrant (here it says 
> 636k per tab and I have 7 tabs open) but it's not 91 megs.
> 
> In a more automated way:
> 
>    cat /proc/5262/maps |
>    ruby -ne 'a=split;b=a[0].split"-";c=b[1].hex-b[0].hex;puts"#{c} #{a[1]}
>    #{a[5]}"' | sort -n
> 
> all on one line, sorts all RAM segments of a process per size, and it 
> seems that it's counting 25 megs of RAM per Gnome process just for the 
> icons, which is mapped read-only. Now, by default, read-only mapped files 
> do not take any more RAM than what they take in the disk cache. This is a 
> lot less cumbersome than a read-write segment, which is the kind of 
> segment that has to be swapped out when you lack RAM.
> 
> In short, "top" is not making a good breakdown of RAM usage.
> 
> I'd like to hear more reasons why startup and general operation might be 
> slow.
> 
>   _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada


-- 
Use the source




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