[Tfug] Suggestions on something less horrifically bloated than Amarok?

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 01:43:59PM -0700, Paul Lemmons wrote:
> I think a lot of those libraries are just general support libs supplied  
> by KDE and others. I took a peek at a small app: "kweatherservice" and  
> it, likewise, has a zillion libraries. It is my guess that these  
> libraries are loaded by KDE and made available to any app needing them.  
> They are not counted in the size of the program because they are  
> considered part of the support framework supplied by KDE, drivers, codec  
> and general multimedia support. I would be curious about how xmms or a  
> text based mp3 player fares. My guess is that xmms would have a similar  
> set and that the text based one would not. I don't have either xmms or a  
> text based mp3 player so someone else will have to take a look.

Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but these libraries will be counted when
you check a process' size via ps or top.  This is one of the reasons it is so
difficult to tell how much memory program X is using on your system.

If you run KDE then these libraries will likely have already been loaded by
the time you run Amarok, but ps/top will include everything that's linked when
counting the memory footprint.  Each additional KDE app will mostly draw from
the already loaded pool of shared libraries and so it's additional memory load
won't be too awful.  Gnome is the same way, though I think its libraries might
be a little lighter.

Now, if you *don't* run KDE, then this is a rather accurate number.  If I
start Gnome and then run Amarok, they will share almost no libraries (other
than maybe libc/libm/etc.).  So the size I get from ps/top will be Amarok +
KDE libraries and since I'm not running any other KDE apps, I can know for
certain that Amarok really is using all that memory.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
Try Weasel Reader for PalmOS  --  http://weaselreader.org
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
of my enemies!"
        --Sam of Sam & Max