Excessive Memory Consumption with Gnome

[kapheine]

A few days ago, when I would start Gnome 2, memory usage would instantly go to about 75% (of 128 megs). Nothing was loaded except what Gnome loads itself. When I checked the memory usage of programs, each one seemed to be taking up a couple megs which added up to 75%. There was no specific program tha took a lot of ram. Also, the memory usage all seemed to be correct (ie: it wasn't like when mozilla is running and top says each thread is taking up X megs when in reality they are all sharing the same memory)

Now the memory usage instantly jumps to 95%. My only thought is that with my optimizations, memory usage increased on each program and since gnome runs so many libraries and programs on startup, maybe they all added up. I was using -march=i686 -O3. If O3 unrolls loops and does inline functions, that may account for it.

Has anyone else had a problem like this? Does anyone have a possible solution? I am probably going to recompile everything with -O2 and see if it makes a difference, but I figured I would ask around first.

[Q]

I am running gnome 2 in VMWare which usually means slowly but I have been suprised at how well behaved and relatively quick it is.

Its using 150MB of ram with Mozilla and mail running. No leaks that I have noticed.

[Pigeon]

Try this. Should fix things right up.

If that doesn't work for you, then this might help a little.

[kapheine]

[Pigeon]

Yeah. =)

On my box, without any programs loaded, twm takes 68 megs. (nfs and samba in the background) Flux is slightly more than that. (but it has the advantage of being a usable window manager. ) (fyi- flux takes less memory than bash does )

Gnome needs quite a chunk of overhead. How much does gtop say your box is using? I tend to trust its numbers more than what wmmemload or top would say.