Re: tlug: Emacs these days

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

Peter Linsley <plinsley@example.com> wrote,

> Your message dated: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 16:37:43 +0900
> [snip] 
> 
> > Probably it is the memory.  What else are you running?  The
> > X server can eat quite some memory and then there is of
> > course our favorite Web browser (probably the most buggy
> > memory sink on this planet after the OS from Redmond).  Try
> > running `top' and see how much memory X, Emacs, and Netscape 
> > is taking and how much of that is resident (the RSS field).
> > Chances are high that part of the memory that Emacs wants to 
> > garbage collect (GC) are swapped out and then GC takes a
> > long time.
> 
> Here is the output of top sorted on resident memory:
> 
> Mem:   30824K av,  30124K used,    700K free,   9976K shrd,    248K buff
> Swap:  64508K av,  37944K used,  26564K free                  4592K cached
> 
>   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
> 19385 plinsley   1   0 16224  12M  1548 S       0  0.1 40.8   7:32 emacs
> 27439 root       0   0  6480 6480  1604 S       0  0.0 21.0   0:02 X
>   359 root       8   0 11672 4920   616 S       0  1.5 15.9  89:26 X
> 21044 root       0   0  6924 4304   528 S       0  0.0 13.9  13:51 X
> 19450 plinsley   3   0 13112 2672   796 S       0  0.0  8.6  16:26 netscape
> 		              .
> 		              .
> 		              .
>                              etc
> 
> Oh, there are those 3 culprits you were talking about. It sure looks like 
> Emacs is being hungry in it's idle state... *sigh*

Three `X'?  This looks like you got two zombies eating your
memory (and CPU).  If I assume, the one with PID 27439 is
the X server that you are actually using, then we have 35MB
memory for Emacs, X, and Netscape, which is bound to lead to
quite some swapping when you change between Netscape and
Emacs.  With two rogue X servers hanging around, the fact
that you can still work on the machine shows that Linux is
quite good at handling virtual memory.

BTW, you should make sure that you have no animations etc
running in Netscape while you are working in Emacs (makes it 
easier for Emacs to get all its working set into main
memory). 

You seem to use Emacs quite heavily, 16MB are usually enough 
for my XEmacs and I am living in that thing.  Anyhow, after
you got rid of the two rogue X, things will probably get
much better.

Manuel
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