After reading Alexander Larsson's post on de-bloating nautilus I thought it would be interesting/useful to see what apps are eating my RAM, as a statistical data point if nothing else.

OS: Ubuntu 8.10. Uptime: 9 days, 20:45 (desktop session also started 9 days ago; I suspend and never log out). Top ten apps, according to top:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
29594 mg        20   0  472m 269m  32m S    3 13.6  23:14.38 firefox
 7383 root      20   0  591m 182m  14m S    4  9.2 557:37.73 Xorg
 5199 mg        20   0  114m  67m  13m S    0  3.4   0:35.71 evince
17256 mg        20   0  230m  64m  24m S    0  3.3   4:10.93 banshee-1
29306 mg        20   0 1652m  62m  19m S    0  3.1   7:38.97 pidgin
 8060 mg        20   0  105m  59m  17m S    0  3.0   1:23.20 tomboy
 8015 mg        20   0  137m  42m  20m S    0  2.2  41:55.95 gnome-panel
 8017 mg        20   0  138m  41m  16m S    0  2.1   2:26.75 nautilus
 8063 mg        20   0 45876  30m 8788 S    0  1.6  33:22.14 multiload-apple
 8087 mg        20   0 80708  28m  15m S    0  1.4   4:45.49 gnome-do

Update: compare these numbers with what I get just 12 hours uptime.

Firefox started leaking memory quite rapidly lately, possibly after I upgraded to 3.0.6+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1 exactly a week ago. I have to restart it once a day if I don't want my 2 gigs of RAM to fill up completely. I hadn't needed to do that before, memory usage stayed pretty constant.

I cannot explain the X.org numbers. pmap doesn't show me RSS numbers, but 150 megs of VIRT are attributed to the heap (an anonymous read-write mapping), while 256 megs look like the frame buffer ("resource2"). xrestop sees a total of 21027K of resources (pixmaps etc.) attributed to all the clients. I have a vague suspicion that this number doesn't include OpenGL textures used by Compiz, but I'm pretty clueless about those things. compiz --replace reduces Xorg's RSS down by 9 megabytes and increases VIRT by 5 megabytes. The increase is mirrored by xrestop, which now shows 25652K in total.

I have two PDFs open in the background since I intend to read them within the next couple of days, this explains the evince data.

I'm not happy about the Banshee memory usage. I wouldn't mind that much if it didn't insist on minimizing to the system tray.

I'm even less happy about Pidgin. Banshee at least has the excuse that it is built on top of Mono, which adds a whole new runtime & virtual machine. And why on Earth does a chat program need 1.6 gigs of virtual memory?

Tomboy: Mono again. But Tomboy is a killer application and I need it.

GNOME Panel: self-explanatory. The multitude of applets that I think that I need fill up both panels and slow down login times as well.

Nautilus: pretty consistent with Alexander's numbers, looks like I can expect improvements in Ubuntu 9.04 or at least 9.10.

Multiload applet: looks like I shouldn't have blamed GNOME Panel's memory usage on applets. 30 megs RSS for four ticking graphs seems a bit biggish, but maybe memory fragmentation is at fault.

GNOME do: people keep blogging about its coolness, then I install it, try it out twice, and forget it. The default GNOME Run dialog does what I need/am used to better.