[PLUG] Swap usage keeps increasing

[Geoff Burling]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004, Felix Lee wrote:

> Wil Cooley:
> >   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
> >  4120 root      15   0 86784  56M  8668 S     3.1 11.1 277:11   0 X
>
> Mel Andres:
> >   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> >  3182 root      25   0  115m  30m 4504 S 35.1 12.1 442:02.83 X
>
> hm.  my X server right now is about 24M virt, 14m rss, but I
> restarted it today.  still, I don't think mine ever gets larger
> than about 50M virt during normal use.

The amount of resources that X uses depends on your Window Manager. I
remember my disgust with Gnome when I finally noticed that it needed
to use swap with 128MB of RAM; keep in mind this was when the contemporary
release of MS Windows ran adequately on half that much physical memory, &
was (well, still is) considered a resource pig.

If you are concerned with keeping resource use to a minimum, experiment
with other Window Managers. There's more than just the Gnome & KDE
desktop environments out there: for example, aewm has the lightest footprint,
but it is so minimalistic to make Fvwm look feature-rich; my
preference is AfterStep, which not only has a smaller footprint than
the best-known WMs (Sawfish, whatever KDE uses, Xfce, Window Maker), but
has its own set of eye candy competitive with these.
>
> >  4541 wcooley   16   0 17772  16M  8476 R     1.7  3.1   4:03   0 gnome-terminal
>
> I'm a little boggled that gnome-terminal is 16m rss.  that's a
> little larger than my emacs process, and twice as large as a
> full-screen 1600x1200x32 pixmap, and 3 times as large as the
> complete works of Shakespeare.  good thing RAM is cheap.

Again, if you are worried about resources, there are alternatives, the
most familiar being rxvt & aterm. Both drop some legacy support which
AFAIK is no longer used (i.e., Tektronix 4014 compatibility), while
adding some eye candy (e.g., translucent backgrounds, customizable
scrollbars).

Then again, as Felix wrote, RAM is cheap: almost anyone can now afford
a Gig of RAM in their home systems (which solves many problems). Yet many
of us do our computing on slender -- if not cashless -- budgets. It
never hurts to consider your priorities with regards with you do with
your computer: if all you do with your computer is surf the web, email
& compose text, then bloat in a WM is not an issue; however, if you
use your computer for resource-intensive projects (e.g., CAD, database,
gaming, etc.), then it makes sense to put X on a diet & allocate the
resources to the project.

After all, customization is one of the strengths Linux (well, any UNIX-like
OS) has over MS Windows.

Geoff