Re: [RFC] VM: I have a dream...

[Diego Calleja <diegocg@gmail.com>]

El Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:05:16 +0000,
Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org> escribió:

> Mozilla / Firefox / Opera in particular.  300MB is not funny on a
> laptop which cannot be expanded beyond 192MB.  Are there any usable
> graphical _small_ web browsers around?  Usable meaning actually works
> on real web sites with fancy features.

Opera is probably the best browser when it comes to "features per byte
of memory used", so if that isn't useful....there's a minimo web browser
(http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/) It's supposed to be designed
for mobile devices, but it may be usable on normal
computers.

The X server itself doesn't eat too many memory. In my box (radeon
9200SE graphic card) the X server only eats 11 MB of RAM - not too
much in my opinion for a 20-years-old code project which according
to the X developers it has many areas where it could be cleaned up.

The X server will grow its size because applications store the
images in the X server. And the X server is supposed to be
network-transparent, so apps send to the x server the data, not
a "reference to the data" (ie: a path to a file), so (i think) the
file cannot be mmap'ed to share the file in memory: there're still
some apps (or so I've heard) which send a image to the server
and keep a private copy in their own address space so the memory 
needed to store those images is *doubled* (gnome used to keep
*three* copies of the background image, one in nautilus, other
in gnome-settings-daemon and another in the X server, and
gnome-terminal keeps another copy when transparency is enabled)


Also, fontconfig allocates ~100 KB of memory per program launched.
There're patches to fix that by creating a mmap'able cache which is
shared between all the applications which has been merged in the
development version. I think there're many low-hanging fruits at
all levels, the problem is not just mozilla & friends
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