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One of the largest tasks in MemoryReduction is going to be looking at how the Linux desktop handles its memory over long usage sessions. Developers often do the patch/compile/run/test cycle so quickly that they never notice their applications growing over time. Advanced users, when they are using a stable desktop, will just killall bloated-application. Evolution has even been so kind as to provide a shortcut, evolution --force-shutdown to allow users to stop the bloatage. In fact, this shortcut was used frequently enough that one user wanted a one letter command line option: ximianbug:46808.

This kind of memory handling may not affect advanced users who know what killall does; however, we can not expect the same of normal users. Applications must be able to keep their memory usage constant over long term sessions. As a community, we need tools that help us test this requirement.

The best way to do this is to get automated stress testing. We should be able to do a tool like this:

Of course the ways of handling messages and the % of stuff that gets handled is just an example. Such a test would be automated. We could use the test in two ways:

Here are a few ideas of what could use this testing:

As far as I know, no such tests really exist here. There may be some that I am not aware of; I'd appreciate pointers to any such test suites.


2024-10-23 11:17