Fwd: Re: [Kde-kiosk] KDE-3.0.1 has horrific memory requirements just for the X server

[Sean McGlynn]

FYI - might be interesting for some, especially now XFree86 4.3.0 is out in 
the wild!

Cheers,
Sean

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [Kde-kiosk] KDE-3.0.1 has horrific memory requirements just for 
the X server
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 21:45:55 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Alan W. Irwin" <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>
To: Waldo Bastian <bastian at kde.org>
Cc: Sean McGlynn <sean at tmiau.com>

Hi Waldo:

This problem finally got resolved, and I am a happy camper!

The problem had nothing to do with KDE or QT.  Instead, the fault was a
layer deeper in X.  Just upgraded from XFree86-4.2.0 to 4.3.0.  Support is
much better in the new version for the S3 trio64 (the video card that was
extremely popular in the mid 90's and which therefore is showing up now in
many old PC's that have been recycled as X-terminals as in my case). For
example, render works and therefore antialiased fonts work for the first
time.  Most importantly all problems with X server memory bloat (where RSS
was exceeding 60MB) have also disappeared.  Fonts are no longer a problem in
this respect, and if I work really hard at it by viewing lots of images I
can get RSS slightly above 30MB, but 20MB is much more typical.  Also, I get
similar RSS results whether I use KDE 2.2.2 or the latest 3.1.1.

I am afraid my previous posts on this subject may have spread some fear
and uncertainty about KDE/QT and X-terminals so could you forward this
prominently to the Kiosk list?  (I am no longer subscribed to that list).

Alan

On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 June 2002 02:33 pm, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> > On my ordinary desktop hardware, top shows that for a reasonably active
> > KDE-3.0.1 desktop, the memory consumed by XFree86 (the X server with
> > version 4.1.0 on my ordinary system) is a ridiculous 40M (the SIZE column
> > of top). Such SIZE requirements for the X server are okay for my ordinary
> > system because I have plenty of memory there, but it is a problem on my
> > X-terminal system.  I have tried displaying KDE-3.0.1 on my X-terminal,
> > but the XFree86 (version 4.2.0 in that case) SIZE there is similar to
> > that of my ordinary system.  However, that is just typical use and
> > sometimes the SIZE gets so large that the X-terminal runs out of its 64MB
> > real memory and crashes.
> >
> > In stark contrast, on a typically active KDE-2.2.2 desktop I just looked
> > at *with 7 instances of xterm, 4 instances of konqueror, and one mozilla
> > open*, the XFree86 SIZE is just 15M, a factor of 3 (!) lower.
>
> Which widget style are you using? Do you have multiple backgrounds for your
> desktops?
>
> Can you check with a fixed number of applications what the memory usage is
> and see if changing the eye-candy level in kpersonalizer and restarting KDE
> makes a difference?
>
> Can you disable "Anti Aliasing" and add "useXFT=false" and
> "enableXFT=false" to ~/.qt/.qtrc and restart KDE, does that make a
> difference?
>
> Cheers,
> Waldo
> --
> bastian at kde.org  |   SuSE Labs KDE Developer  |  bastian at suse.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> kde-kiosk mailing list
> kde-kiosk at mail.kde.org
> http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-kiosk

__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliation with the PLplot scientific plotting software package
(plplot.org).

__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

-------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Sean McGlynn
sean at tmiau.com

It has been pointed out to me that a recent email sig of mine
may have caused offence to accordion players. For this I humbly apologise :-)