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:
- Set up an imap mail account and smtp server.
- Replay the last year of 50 high traffic mailing lists to the account. Set the thing to create a new folder per mailing list per month.
- Run Evolution
- Look at every message that is in the mail box
- On 1/10th of the messages, reply. Replies should be of various lengths. Some of them should be saved as a draft. Others should be discarded and sent to the trash. Maybe 1/30 should be sent.
- On 1/50th of the messages forward them.
- Move one out of 20 messages to a different folder.
"Print" one out of 100 (don't waste paper
)
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:
- The application can be run under valgrind. This is helpful for developers who need to know why the application grows.
The application can be run without valgrind, and we can use ps to test memory usage. This is good for a automated build type of setup: it can help developers see problems that arise during the development cycle.
Here are a few ideas of what could use this testing:
- Evolution, as stated above. Need to test multiple types of email accounts, calendar, address book.
- Nautilus (go around and look at every folder on the fs)
- gconfd (this one should be fairly easy because we don't have to automate any GUI)
- gnome-settings-daemon (need to test that settings can be changed without leaking memory, again gui-less)
- gnome-panel (do various tasks such as switching desktops, playing with the clock, etc)
- Firefox (spider, eg, cnn.com)
- OOo (Open and close documents, write documents, etc)
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.
Mozilla seems to have some test cases at least: http://www.mozilla.org/performance/leak-brownbag.html. But from the amount of leakage I see on my box, I wouldn't have known ;-).
There is also the stuff that the GNOME Bangalore guys did: http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/Main_Page. This could be used to do memory stress tests possibly.