[gentoo-user] Re: I want my xmms

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-01-03, Alan McKinnon <alan@××××××××××××××××.za> wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 January 2007 15:17, Nelson, David (ED, PAR&D) wrote:
>
>> I moved to amarok, I might give audacious a shot.
>>
>> What about noatun for a smallish player? Not sure on it's RAM usage.
>> Also look at Quod Libet or Banshee which are meant to be similar in
>> features to amarok but lighter in terms of resource usage (or so I
>> hear).
>>
>> David
>
> David, this reply isn't directed at you. You just happen to be the most
> recent post and a convenient reply point.
>
> Throughout this thread many people have commented on audacious being a
> resource hog of monumental proportions. Every single one of them is
> wrong and this myth really needs to be debunked. Here's why:
>
> Look at the libs it links against:

[...]

> It's those libs that are using the memory, not audacious. Those are
> shared libs, meaning many other apps on the system use them

That's only relevent if there are other apps running that use
those libraries. 

Even if you assume they _are_ all used by other apps, audacious
still uses huge amounts of non-shared memory:

Here's my "top" display sorted by memory usage:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ COMMAND     

 2743 root      15   0 56604  33m 9.9m S  0.0  2.2  10:59.72 X  
20384 grante    15   0 58696  14m 9696 R  0.0  1.0   0:00.54 audacious          
 2771 grante    15   0 32796  12m 7968 S  0.0  0.8   0:04.56 xfce4-session      
 2782 grante    15   0 31176 9784 6968 S  0.0  0.6   0:04.66 xfce4-panel        
 7195 root      18   0 20692 9200 4476 S  0.0  0.6   0:00.41 apache2            
 2784 grante    15   0 32304 9096 7076 S  0.0  0.6   0:31.95 gkrellm            
 2773 grante    15   0 30912 8876 5832 S  0.0  0.6   0:03.89 xfce-mcs-manage    
 2780 grante    18   0 13508 8352 6052 S  0.0  0.5   0:09.53 xfdesktop          
 7696 roundup   18   0 11400 7268 1464 S  0.0  0.5   0:00.41 roundup-server     
 2778 grante    15   0 12488 7148 5740 S  0.0  0.5   0:07.98 xftaskbar4         
18057 apache    17   0 20692 6672 1924 S  0.0  0.4   0:00.00 apache2            
18058 apache    20   0 20692 6672 1924 S  0.0  0.4   0:00.00 apache2            
18059 apache    19   0 20692 6672 1924 S  0.0  0.4   0:00.00 apache2            

The X server is using 56M of virtual memory with 33M resident
and 10M shared.  Audacious is using 58M of with 14M resident
and 10M shared.

> and the total memory they consume is used by all apps that use
> the libs. And, every one of those libs (apart from
> libaudacious) can reasonably be expected to be in use already
> on any desktop machine running X

Nonsense.  Audacious is using 44MB of non-shared virtual memory
on my system.  44MB out of 58MB is not shared.

> Here's 'free' before and after I started audacious in another session:
>
> nazgul ~ # free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers
> cached
> Mem:       2076984    1844696     232288          0     246056
> 1220848
> -/+ buffers/cache:     377792    1699192
> Swap:            0          0          0
> nazgul ~ # free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers
> cached
> Mem:       2076984    1851528     225456          0     246060
> 1222324
> -/+ buffers/cache:     383144    1693840
> Swap:            0          0          0
>
> So starting audacious consumed an extra 6M of memory - that's nowhere
>  near the 240M other posters are incorrectly stating it uses.

I've no idea where the number 240M came from, you didn't hear
it from me.   It's about 14MB of resident (6MB reduction in
"free" memory) on my system, which makes it the second largest
memory user (second only to the X server).

> So, anyone that says audacious is a resource hog is plain flat
> out wrong

You don't think that 58M of virtual memory usage isn't a
resource hog when the X server only requires 56M and the next
largest program is 32M?  Virtual memory _is_ a resource,
though not an expensive one.

> and does not know how the Linux virtual memory system works.
> It is complex and almost impossible to know what is going on
> at any instant in time, but that's no excuse for people being
> wrong by a factor of 500%

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  All this time I've
                                  at               been VIEWING a RUSSIAN
                               visi.com            MIDGET SODOMIZE a HOUSECAT!

-- 
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