xfce4-panel & memory cunsumption

[Jasper Huijsmans]

2006/9/11, Kresimir Spes <kreso at cateia.com>:
>
>
>
>  If it uses it, it needs it, right? I'm fairly certain that basically
> all memory used by a clock plugin is GTK.
>
>
>  there's no doubt about it, but in my opinion, it's not necesary, why
> shouldn't the panel feature a simple clock that can be enabled or disabled
> in the panel preferences or something?
>

It does. The clock is internal.

>
>
>
>  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?
>
>  it's illogical for the panel to take 20-30 MB's of RAM when gnome-panel,
> kicker, which are supposed to be resource hogs take significantly less.

1) you didn't hear me say they are memory hogs

2) Olivier's numbers show something else.

>
>
>  Jasper
>
> PS, ideas about reducing memory usage are always welcome.
>
>  well, having the current system in mind, I don't think there's a way to
> reduce memory usage as every plugin is an application by itself.

You didn't address the problem with crashing, leaking and blocking
plugins, which is nicely solved by making them external. Not to
mention the ability to write them in someting other than C.

>  I suggest (If I may, please don't consider this as criticism or anything, I
> really appreciate all the hard work put in to xfce), I suggest to integrate
> some basic plugins into the panel, and allow the user a choice wheter to use
> them or an external plugin. Those basic plugins would certainly be the menu
> plugin, taskbar, pager, maby genmon, but certainly systray and the clock.

The menu blocks and greatly increases the startup time (check 4.2), I
don't consider genmon a common plugin (I may be wrong, though), the
other are already internal.

        Jasper

PS
There is this one idea that I had that may be interesting for 4.6:
make all plugins internal for their GUI part (buttons, icons, progress
bars), but use a separate progress to collect and manipulate data.

PPS
The menu parsing should be (will be) a library function, with caches
and stufff, so the menu can become an internal plugin again.