Re: [ft-devel] Regarding GTK/GNOME memory usage optimization

[Vladimir Volovich]

"TD" == Turner, David writes:

 TD> It probably is the problem. I installed Ubuntu, and at the first
 TD> gdm greeting, which isn't something very complex. my X server
 TD> already uses 140 Mb of virtual memory, 130 of them being
 TD> shared. Interestingly, 'free' tells me I'm using less
 TD> memory. Same on Mandrake. There is nothing in the BIOS, or even
 TD> the Windows driver, to change the amount of "reserved" or
 TD> "shared" graphics memory. I won't try to understand what these
 TD> numbers mean at this point.

some explanations on X memory usage can be read in
/usr/share/doc/xfree86-common/FAQ.gz

See e.g.:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2002/09/msg00098.html

Also, a quote from http://cbbrowne.com/info/memorymgmt.html

> pmap analyzes memory usage of processes on Linux
>
> This may be used to determine what's going on with X memory usage
> thus: pmap `pidof X`
>
> The result, on my system, was that X was mapping a total of 231MB, but
> of that, 169MB was being shared with other things (e.g. - shared
> libraries, the RAM on the graphics card, and so forth) such that the
> actual consumption associated with X itself was around 55MB, which is
> not particularly outrageous.

Best,
v.