Re: [RFC] VM: I have a dream...

From: Jamie Lokier
Date: Wed Jan 25 2006 - 12:25:12 EST


Diego Calleja wrote:
> Opera is probably the best browser when it comes to "features per byte
> of memory used"

Really? If I'm making use it, maybe visiting a few hundred pages a
day, and opening 20 tabs, I find I have to kill it every few days, to
reclaim the memory it's hogging, when its resident size exceeds my RAM
size and it starts chugging.

> Also, fontconfig allocates ~100 KB of memory per program launched.
> There're patches to fix that by creating a mmap'able cache which is
> shared between all the applications which has been merged in the
> development version. I think there're many low-hanging fruits at
> all levels, the problem is not just mozilla & friends

100kB per program, even for 100 programs, is nothing compared a
browser's 300MB footprint. Now, some of that 300MB is permanently
swapped out for the first few days of running. Libraries and such.
Which is relevant to this thread: swap is useful, just so you can swap
out completely unused parts of programs. (The parts which could be
optimised away in principle).

-- Jamie
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