[gentoo-user] Re: Something eats my memory - please help

[Kai Krakow]

Am Sun, 9 Apr 2017 23:40:15 +0200
schrieb David Haller <gentoo@×××××××.de>:

> Hello,
>
> On Sun, 09 Apr 2017, Kai Krakow wrote:
> >Am Sun, 9 Apr 2017 19:09:23 +0200
> >schrieb David Haller <gentoo@×××××××.de>:
> >
> >> On Sun, 09 Apr 2017, Kai Krakow wrote:
>  [...]
> >>
> >> Tell us, why exactly would one need upower again, anyway?
> >
> >If you don't need it, don't use it. This was an example, not a call
> >to use it.
> >
> >It reports battery status of peripherals for me.
>
> Surely, there must be other apps to report this for you, besides a
> mem-hogging behemoth, that (I guess) actually does not much more than
> 'cat /sys/...something'! .5 Gig or even more?? You're kidding me,
> right? Riiigghhhhhtt????? That's just plain insane! Stuff like that
> should run in a few KB. Or a few MB with a fancy GUI and DE
> integration.

It uses 1M of memory currently. The 512M limit I set is just a safety
boundary. I don't actually want to limit it, but when it goes havoc
it's as least limited.

> You could probably do that with a few lines of perl/python/ruby plus
> the toolkit of your choice (Tk, Gtk, Qt, Wx, Fltk, ...).

Yes, I could probably code everything myself in tiny little
scriptlets. But it's not worth the effort. This machine has 16G of
memory, it can run full-blown KDE, it uses 5G of memory after fully
booted (including two containers, mysql and elasticsearch, for devel
purposes), and that boots in 30s from a mixed bcache/btrfs file system.

> I e.g. wanted a minmal clock to have while playing movies fullscreen.

That's what I have a smartphone for. I don't sit in front of my PC to
watch full-screen movies (tho, the TV is connected to the machine).

> Result: ~21 lines of generously formatted perl using Tk and a
> bold-white-on-black (easily changeable) digital clock with a mere
> 38x20 pixels in the right-top-corner (easily changeable).

That's a nice solution if you have enough time and want to stay
minimal on system pressure. I just want to stay minimal on
distractions, so I don't have CPU meters and whatever always visible
on screen. I also don't need all those fancy live graphics of memory,
disk usage, CPU, load, whatever on the X root window. I never
understand what's the purpose of that is anyways because I have
multiple windows in front of it. Hence, I even have no icons on the
desktop, just some different background images to easily distinguish
between energy profiles: I'm using activities to switch between
"listen to music", "watch videos/play games", "development", and
"browse internet and other desktop activities". And I hardly use menus
to start programs: I use the krunner search and a fullscreen launcher
for my favorite apps. I really hate those deeply nested menu launchers,
I want flat easy structures, searchable. During development I almost
only use keyboard shortcuts.

> Haven't implemented the "Keep on top" stuff right though yet, but ISTR
> that should be possible too with perl/Tk. Or any of the above
> mentioned lang/toolkit combos. And the "on-top" stuff also depends on
> your WM in the details.

That should be pretty much standardized by now, probably you could just
call "xprop -set" from your scripts.

> And anyway: 'eix batt' spits out e.g. x11-misc/xbatt,
> x11-misc/xbattbar, x11-plugins/wmbatteries...

Plain old X programs with Tk or xwidgets are exactly not what I am
looking for. I seek a visually streamlined desktop, so I mostly
exclusively use Qt or KDE programs excepts there's no suitable
alternative. So, e.g. I still use gitk a lot although I found git-cola
appealing. Still I'm doing lot of git stuff directly on the console. I
use git-cola only for fast and easy hunk committing and visual browsing
of current workspace status.

> As I do just have a normal below-desk PC, I can't help with the
> /sys/*batt*? stuff, but if it breaks down to basically displaying the
> contents of some files under /sys/ then it's a piece of cake whupping
> up an UI displaying that as e.g percent or whatever.)

I have a normal below-desk PC, too, hidden inside the desk, and 6 or 7
years old [1]. But I use a wireless mouse and keyboard for working - I
don't want cables and lots of stuff visible on or under my desk. And I
want some battery warning/status for these devices, integrating with
what I run: KDE Plasma.

> Probably, I'd just have to change the "update" sub (1 line) of my
> clock to read that /sys/-file instead of the time and
> whoopididoooda ;)

You are free to put it on github or so, I'd even be curious looking at
it.

> A fancy graphic bar would be a bit more coding.

It's always nice when new features integrate easy as I can tell from my
own projects, tho I do ruby mostly.

> Oh, and have a look at gkrellm and its plugins. It might have all you
> want already and then some :)

No, I hate that. See above. Too overwhelmin, too distracting, and
either it steals screen real estate or isn't visible anyways and thus
no need to run it altogether. As I said, I never understood why one
would need such fancy monitor stuff. If I feel the need of monitoring
some status, I usually do this in a console window using CLI tools.

> Now, integration in the "big" DEs of KDE/Gnome3, you're screwed.
> Royally. But that comes with those DEs anyway. Like Gnome3 requiring
> systemd (WTF?)...

Systemd actually does a lot of things right for me, like bringing the
system up and down reliably which sysvinit/openrc often didn't. And it
does this fast.

> But, you can still display stuff without "integration".

Actually, I want integration. And I wish that the Linux desktop would
gain a lot more progress here. I guess it's always a game of choice
vs. integration: With Linux, you have a lot of choice but also a lot of
competing solutions which do not integrate so well with each other.

Don't get me wrong: I prefer choice and configuration over vendor
locking, but I think that all those Linux components need to learn to
integrate better with each other, and systemd is one big player of
this. And by this I don't mean to lock down hard dependencies to
systemd. But systemd provides a long needed API definition that
everyone could implement. Depending on such an API would be okay for
me, hard depends on systemd, tho, is not what should be done, as that
would take away choice.

> Myself, I found WindowMaker in ~200[01] and am happy as a bunny since
> then, I think I had to change just one option _ONCE_ since then in my
> config. One "forced" change in ~1[67] years? I'll call that ok! Sure,
> there was new, optional stuff, but documented and often times even
> appearing as e.g. a new checkbox in the WPrefs app. Compare _that_ to
> KDE ... I switched to WMaker, avoiding KDE2.0! Never looked back.

I used CDE on Solaris late in the 90's and always hated it. I arranged
with using fluxbox by that time, I also tried WindowMaker for a while
on my privat machine. Then came KDE based on Qt and it did a lot of
things in a way I liked - and I stayed with it since then, with some
experiments using Ubuntu and it's Unity desktop (which I kinda liked
for some ideas but mostly hated for it's non-configurability).

> PS: yes, Windowmaker was and is what I was looking for, but KDE 1.1
>     served ok until then. And I did look at KDE2-5 and Gnome1-3 in
>     various version, no, not for me. *bleargh*

Well, Plasma 5 is for me, but visually stripped down a lot, and
configured mostly for flat colors, no window borders, and with subtle
shadows and almost no colors (except important spots on the screen). It
looked a lot like Win8 or Win10 for me before those were distributed,
with some usability ideas "borrowed" from OS X (yes, plasma 5.9
luckily brought back the global menu bar so I could unclutter the
windows even more).

KDE 3 by that time started to become a cluttered mess, pumped full of
stuff you never need and visually becoming too distracting. That was
the time when I started to try other desktops. Then came KDE 4 which
had some nice ideas but was becoming a mess and migration nightmare, I
lived with that and stripped away what wasn't working correctly, or
replaced it with alternatives (mostly web-based). Now, since some
months, Plasma 5 has come into real good shape. And thanks to
Chrome/Chromium I can run many web-based apps like normal desktop apps
(with their own native looking windows instead of in browser tabs).

[1]: Storage, CPU coolor, and graphics card has been upgraded
     since ;-)

-- 
Regards,
Kai

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