[techtalk] StarOffice and Gnome installation issues

Karl-Heinz Zimmer khz at snafu.de
Sun Nov 14 19:25:50 EST 1999


On 11/13/99, 12:37:15 PM, Nils Philippsen erroneously:

> StarOffice is a real memory hog

Unfortunately this is true.  :-(
We managed it to spend less memory that StarOffice 5.0 but
it still needs quite a lot.

> a quick test gave this:

The filowing (fortunately!) is *not* correct:

> It eats additional 2MB in the X-Server and forks off
> 6 copies of itself, giving 7 instances running.
                               ^^^^^^^^^
                                     ;-)

> If Linux didn't do such a good job in memory
> management (copy-on-write and stuff), it would consume
> between 100 and 120 MB of RAM (and that's with shared
> memory taken into account).

> Background: I got my numbers from top(1).

:-DD

I am happy to be able to tell you that 'facts' being told
to us above are not right.

Of course StarOffice doesn't use that amount of memory!

At the very moment now while writing this mail i had a
short look at 'ps -m' ('top' resp.) and laughed when seeing
the number of 9 (nine!) entries of 'soffice.bin'.  By opening
some other tasks within StarOffice i could easily have that
number increased even more - with each of them pretending to
consume 35 MB.

The simple reason for the common misunderstanding of that
phenomenon and for lots of trouble is that some people start
writing their ideas and theories down without having ensured
that they are true!

StarOffice doesn't consume that Mem for each 'instances' because
there AREN'T ANY MULTIPLE INSTANCES - even if it looks like that.

Instead of this StarOffice runs multiple THREADS (not instances)
to improve performance and all of these threads of course use
THE SAME MEMORY.

The stupid fact that 'ps -m' or 'top' don't show this clearly
caused *some* people to call us by phone and complain about that
Mem Vaste they seemed to have found there.

Work is not always easy for my colleagues of the Support...  ;-)

Best greetings,

Karl-Heinz
-- 
K.-H. Zimmer     *     Hamburg     *     Germany




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