Bad coding practices in Fedora packages

[Pádraig Brady]

On 01/03/2012 01:32 PM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> I installed F16 on a new machine, trying to keep the installation
> more or less lean. Meaning - not installing tons of packages w/o
> thinking and ending up with tons of installed stuff I don't even know
> what it is.
> 
> Today, I'm looking at my process list, sorted by amount of dirtied pages
> (which very closely matches amount of malloced and used space - that is,
> malloced, but not-written to memory areas are not included).
> This is the most expensive type of pages, they can't be discarded.
> If we would be in memory squeeze, kernel will have to swap them out,
> if swap exists, otherwise kernel can't do anything at all.
> 
> And this is what I see (DIRTY column):
> 
>   PID   VSZ VSZRW   RSS (SHR) DIRTY^(SHR) STACK COMMAND
>  1974  593m  392m  233m 14900  200m    64   208 /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin
>  2030  589m  393m  188m 16568  156m   684   344 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
>  1375 27976 14100 14288  5752  9912  3896   132 /usr/bin/Xorg
>  1888 71748 55152 14056  4268  9536     0   132 /usr/libexec/tracker-store
>  1953  145m 44672 17588  6812  8880    88   132 /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins/xfce4-mixer-plugin
>  2057  167m  9036 18944 10124  8236   280   204 xchat
>  4292 15728  8344 10236  1440  7848     0   132 /usr/bin/mc -u -d -C
>  1892 36464  7608 16396  7116  7296     0   136 {applet.py} /usr/bin/python /usr/share/system-config-printer/applet.py
>  1874 48464 27060 12408  5568  6180     0   132 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs
>  1941  107m 13872 14784  8968  5620   768   132 Terminal
>  1901 44748 26400 10872  5012  5560     0   132 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-flickr
> ...
> 
> thunderbird, firefox, xorg are the largest ones, but this
> is not a surprise.
> 
> Whoops. What is tracker-store? I don't even know what's that
> and why is it running, and it's eating ~10 mbytes in DIRTY.
> Hmm. There are more of those things - tracker-miner-fs,
> tracker-miner-flickr. There go another 12 megs...
> And - flickr??
> I did not ask anything flickr-related to be *run* on my machine!

Just a comment on the accuracy of the numbers.

# ps_mem.py¹ | grep tracker

  3.2 MiB + 730.5 KiB =   3.9 MiB       tracker-miner-fs
  3.9 MiB + 722.5 KiB =   4.6 MiB       tracker-miner-flickr
  5.5 MiB + 549.0 KiB =   6.0 MiB       tracker-store

I've attached the complete output from my newly installed F16 laptop,
which shows around 300MiB of RAM being used in total.

cheers,
Pádraig.

¹ http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py
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