Here we list known bugs for applications or libraries that consume too much memory. Feel free to pick one and fix it! If you are working on it, please annotate this page with your name so that everyone can know who is working on what.

If you finish fixing something, please move it to the ../ProgressTracker page.

In addition to the specific bugs listed below, the 'memory' keyword in bugzilla lists bugs which impact memory usage. Please use that keyword when filing new memory usage bugs so that they show up in this list.

FAM takes 4MB

Link to here

gnomebug:314281

The FAM daemon takes about 4MB of memory when running. Browsing into large directories like /usr/bin or /usr/lib bring it up even higher. Gamin (A FAM replacement) takes a similar amount of memory when using dnotify. When using gamin+inotify we it still uses about 2MB of memory. The patch attech in gnomebug:314281 removes the need to run the FAM/gamin daemon by using inotify directly.

gnome-terminal takes .5 MB / tab

Link to here

gnomebug:160582

It seems that gnome-terminal (vte really...) allocates quite a bit of data per terminal. This is a killer for developers.

Is this the same as gnomebug:309322, which has a patch? It saves about 500k/tab for me.

Const arrays in Pango

Link to here

gnomebug:168899

Pango keeps some arrays that can be made completely const; this will allow them to live completely in the .rodata section of the binary, and without relocations for strings inside structures.

gnome-vfs / howl adds 1MB per process

Link to here

howl (optionally linked from gnome-vfs) has a 1MB non-const array whose only purpose appears to be debugging. It could probably be easily removed when debugging is disabled.

KjartanMaraas: This looks like it might be fixed in later releases. From the howl changelog:

1.0.0

  • - FIX: compile out heap debugging when NDEBUG macro is set during compilation

0.9.9 also cleans up some memory leaks it seems...

Initiatives/MemoryReduction/KnownBugs (last edited 2013-11-22 21:16:21 by WilliamJonMcCann)