Re: mozilla - 5 processes using 149Mb
On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 10:29:38PM +1200, Alan Macdougall wrote:
> On 17/6/01 at 1:45 AM, Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net> wrote:
>
> > > Typing "mozilla" at the command line seems to
> > > cause 5 separate processes to be started,
> > > taking in total 149Mb of memory (accorting to
> > > gtop). Given that I only have 64Mb of real RAM
> > > and 50Mb of swap it doesn't take much to end
> > > up thrashing the disk and an unusably slow
> > > experience.
> >
> > no its not. rtfm these are threads, there is
> > only one process, not 4 and its not taking 149MB
> > of ram.
> The Gnome System Monitor help docs say: "No two processes will have the
> same number." Therefore my assumption that the five lines I was seeing
> in gtop were separate processes was perhaps reasonable, given that they
> all had different PIDs. Threads are not mentioned.
well the fnome system monitor docs are right... sort of
see processes all have seperate pid's, however on linux threads also get
different pids. It is really a very sensible mechanism so dont go sproting
some argument linux threads should all be inside one process and such.
Anyway threads of course have shared address space, ie shared memory between
all the threads. On linux this means you get the output od ps on all the
threads looking pretty much identical except for the pid. Unfortunately not
many tools bother detecting that these are threads and displaying such
information.
If you look at the /proc/<pid>/maps file for each thread you will see they
have the same memory in use so are not infact chewing up 150 MB.
> Further, the memory usage panel (set to show resident memory) seemed to
> be adding the resident memory totals for these threads together to come
> up with the 149Mb figure. This absurdly high figure seemed to be borne
> out by the incredible disk thrashing that occurred whenever I used
> Mozilla for just a short time.
that is due to the memory usage panel being braindead and not detecting
threads (which is admittedly hard to do outside kernel space)
As for mozilla causing problems and swaps and such, well it is a big hunk of
memory hungry browser, it hapilly chews lots of memory, and so it iwll start
forcing stuff in memory out if you dont have much memory in the first place,
get used to it I suppose.
> Anyway, the bottom line is that on my machine, Mozilla is unusably slow.
> Are there any lighter alternatives around?
I can understand that, and yest here are lighter weight alternatives, some of
the mozilla derivatives such as galeon or light seem to use much less cpu
(about 1/10th as much or less)
See You
Steve
--
sjh@wibble.net http://wibble.net/~sjh/
Look Up In The Sky
Is it a bird? No
Is it a plane? No
Is it a small blue banana?
YES
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