Re: [gentoo-user] I want my xmms

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 23:43, Robert Cernansky wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Jan 2007 16:05:18 +0200 Alan McKinnon
<alan@××××××××××××××××.za> wrote:
> > 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:
>
> I agree. I'm still using xmms so I can compare. Here are few lines
> from top (displaying a Mem window - 'Shift+g 3'). Both players were
> playing same mp3 file.
>
>   PID %MEM  VIRT SWAP  RES CODE DATA  SHR nFLT nDRT S  PR %CPU
> COMMAND 8810 10.9  172m  62m 109m 1620 108m 9104  779    0 S  15  0.0
> X 11170  9.7  308m 210m  97m   80 129m  19m  897    0 S  15  0.0
> firefox-bin 7750  2.0  164m 143m  20m  480  41m  11m  117    0 R  15
> 0.0 audacious 7810  1.8 49940  30m  17m 1524   9m 5016   72    0 S
> 15  0.0 emacs 7739  1.1  149m 138m  11m  984  59m 7816   49    0 R
> 15  0.0 xmms

Ah, a real comparison - I don;t have xmms anymore so couldn't do the 
same in my post. These numbers are interesting, although audacious is 
using more resident memory, xmms is using way much more for DATA.

IMHO audacious is using a perfectly reasonable amount of resources, 
considering what it's being asked to do - decode and play an mp3 file 
which is probably about 5M or so. 

Incidentally, I just did a similar comparison on my machine between 
audacious and amarok, and found that amarok consistently uses at least 
2.2 times the amount of memory that audacious does. And I've never 
heard anyone call amarok a resource-hog.

I think the problem here is that very few folk have any comprehension at 
all what that VIRT column means and how the kernel has been coded to 
deal with virtual memory and COW. For an in-depth technical handling of 
the subject, I recommend the book "Understanding the Linux Virtual 
memory Manager" as part of the Bruce Perens Open Source Series
>
> Although audacious eats twice more resident memory than xmms, I think
> it's not that bad to call it 'resource hog'. You can see real
> resource hogs on the first two lines. :-)

Hehe, I see you have a firefox that's probably a) been up for several 
days and b) is very aggressively caching everything it can lay it's 
hands on

> Btw, how do you guys get so little virtual memory? :-O

Dunno :-) Right now it's not so lean anymore, X has caused 173M virtual 
memory to be used, most of it kde-libs related stuff. The *real* 
resource hog on this machine strangely enough is kontact - memory usage 
can jump 60M when I start it up. It's probably because it needs most of 
konqueror loaded to render this other idiotic thing that corporate 
users seem to love - I believe it's called "HTML mail"....

alan
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