[rox-devel] Re: Rox Filer: Memory usage

[Alexander W. <a.w...@st...>]

Hi!

Guido Schimmels wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Apr 2005 14:03:15 +0100
> Thomas Leonard <ta...@ec...> wrote:
>
>>The memory cache is cleared at the same time as the disk cache, when you
>>click on the purge button in options.

First of all this I didn't notice and it will help a bit
:-) Thanks for pointing it out!

>>Maybe it should happen on a timeout too (memory only).

IMHO a good idea!

> A configurable upper bound would be nice.

Yepp. Perfectly agree. I believe to combine this with the
idea of a timeout would be perfect.

Also I found that the disk cache for thumbnails (ie. the
number of files) grows and seems not to be reduced during "a
run" of the Filer, except by cleaning it by hand. This is
a problem in environments with file quota (as I have it
here). Currently I solve this with some symlinking via the
AutoStart of WindowMaker. Additionally I'm not entirely sure
that it speeds things up if the cache lives on NFS. So
probably an option to disable this one could help. I'm not
sure but I believe the disk cache is meant for large images
which need a lot of time to scale down to a thumbnail.
Probably one should exclude "icons" (ie. images < somesize x
somesize) from this cache?

> Caching doesn't speed up things really when it makes you
> hit swap -

Ok, I actually didn't hit that problem running here at some
1.G, but having some large jobs always in the background...

> quite the opposite.  A cache that never get's returned to
> the pool is effectively a leak.

Agree.

> That's a shame, considering my ROX Linux Desktop starts up
> with merely 32M used total.

Agree again. ROX is very nice on small boxes as it gives a
decent desktop at a low ressource profile. Except this
memory problem I experience.

-- 

Kind regards,                /                 War is Peace.
                            |            Freedom is Slavery.
Alexander Wagner            |         Ignorance is Strength.
----------------------------|
Theoretische Physik II      | Theory     : G. Orwell, "1984"
Universitaet Wuerzburg     /  In practice:   USA, since 2001