[rekonq] Rekonq and RAM comsumption

[Andrea Diamantini]

On Monday 07 June 2010 12:58:57 Daniel Avilés Hurtado wrote:
> Hello, and thanks for your work.
> 
> I have started to use Rekonq recently (when it came into Debian repos),
> although I have been followed it several months from KDE-apps.
> 
> I like it very much: is clear and fast, and maybe soon will replace
> Iceweasel in my PC.
> 
> There is a question, however: I have seen that most of the times, when I
> close the app, it is still showed in the system monitor as it was active,
> using about 30-35 Mb of RAM, and, besides, there are a lot of kio_http
> related with Rekonq. Is it what it is supposed to be? Because I thought
> that when an application is closed, it should free the resources it used.
> 
> My PC has 3 Gb of RAM, so it can afford this, but the laptop of a friend of
> mine has 7 years old, and it just has 512 Mb RAM, so I do not want to
> install him an app that continues using RAM even when it is closed.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> By the way, I do like the logo, it reminds me a dragon, and I like dragons 
> (although I have never owned one)  ;-)

Hi Daniel,
I'm glad you like our work on this.
About memory consumption, you noticed 2/3 different things. Trying to explain:

1) rekonq memory usage
This is where we can work most :)
And we are working a lot about. I think there are no more big leaks about, but 
probably some optimizations to do, the most about history, bookmarks and tab 
previews

2) QtWebkit memory usage
Here there are some problems, for example in the QtWebKit release shipped with 
Qt 4.6.2. That's because the project is as young as we are, but it's "a bit 
more complicated" :)
Anyway, things are shaping nicely and next versions (eg: QtWebKit 2.0 being 
released with Qt 4.7) are an huge step forward.

3) KIO memory usage
rekonq uses KIO (KDE Input/Output) for network operations. KIO has its own 
scheduler responsible for "cleaning the garbage". When you close rekonq, KIO 
still maintains alive connections rekonq related because their closing depends 
(in our cases) from HTTP parameters.
So, if you just wait 30 seconds after rekonq is closed, you'll see 
disappearing all KIO calls coming from there. Just noticing that this will 
happen also with every KDE app using network (and hence KIO).

Regards,
-- 
Andrea Diamantini, adjam
GPG Fingerprint: 57DE 8E32 7D1A 0E16 AA52 59D8 84F9 3ECD DBF9 730F

rekonq project
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