xfce4-panel & memory cunsumption

[Jasper Huijsmans]

2006/9/11, Kresimir Spes <kreso at cateia.com>:
...
>
> The GTK+ "helloworld" sample program is probably the most simple GTK+
> program one may write. It just open a window with a button that print
> "Hello world" in the console when pressed. You'll probably agree that
> this is not the the kind of super heavy weight application. But still,
> according to gnome-system-monitor (as you mentionned it), it uses 5.7
> Mb of RSS (Resident memory for text and data). Quite a lot, and that
> doesn't come from the progarm itself, but rather from gtk+ and its
> dependencies.
>
> You also mentionned fbpanel. Originally, fbpanel did not use any toolkit
> at all but Xlib. But recent versions uses gtk+ and fbpanel (the latest
> from SF.net, version 4.5) uses also quite a lot of memory. Not too far
> from the xfce panel, but with a lot less functionality IMHO.
>
> I've also listed Firefox and Thunderbird, just for the record. I don't
> think that the xfce panel uses that much memory, compared to others,
> given the amount of memory used by GTK+ itself.
>
> Don't you think so?
>
>  I couldn't agree more, and I can't blame firefox and thunderbird for using
> much memory as it really needs it, I was just refering to xfce-panel,
> because, the panel itself takes about 5 megs + each applet, at least 1-2.
>  fbpanel does take 2 mb's, but it has a few icons, a clock, pager and
> taskbar. but once again, I was using fbpanel as an example.

I'd be happy to apply any patch that reduces the panels memory
footprint, without removing (too much) functionality. It won't be
easy, though. Most of it is from either GTK itself or from image data.

>
>  what I'm trying to say is, the panel should perhaps integrate these basic
> features into it's code,

If you give me a euro for every bug report about a plugin that crashes
the panel, or makes it eat 300M of memory, I'll make them all
internal... seriously, have a look at the mailing list archives.

> I mean, why would a clock applet that really needs
> a few bytes of memory, use 2 MB?

If it uses it, it needs it, right? I'm fairly certain that basically
all memory used by a clock plugin is GTK.

> Once again, not that it matters to me that
> much since I have 1 GB of RAM, but for someone with 32 or 64 mb's, it
> matters a lot.
>
>  don't get me wrong, I love xfce, and especialy thunar [ :-) ], it's just
> that I'm curious about these few "ilogical" issues.

I don't see anything that seems illogical, what did I miss?

        Jasper

PS, ideas about reducing memory usage are always welcome.