memory usage by some apps - is this normal ?

[David Timms]

Hi all,

With updated fc6, I have left my PC on for the last few days, and 
noticed it was really slow {I was doing a nice'd clamscan of the whole 
disk}. The machine has 512MB ram, but just before I took this text 
capture, I had firefox running virt=260MB {this had also caused java_vm 
to be running virt=230MB} ie 512MB ram just for these two - does this 
seem normal ?
=====
top - 06:24:42 up 1 day, 18:55,  3 users,  load average: 0.58, 0.84, 1.57
Tasks: 142 total,   1 running, 141 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  3.0%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 95.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.3%hi,  0.3%si, 
0.0%st
Mem:    514160k total,   298600k used,   215560k free,     5172k buffers
Swap:  1859808k total,   236808k used,  1623000k free,   145220k cached

   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND 

  4379 18   0  155m  12m 5960 S  0.0  2.5   2:03.21 thunderbird-bin
  3176 15   0  133m 1144  324 S  0.0  0.2   0:04.03 mysqld
  3728 15   0  124m  13m 4496 S  0.3  2.7   1:09.55 nautilus
  3822 15   0  101m  748  748 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.26 trashapplet
  3751 15   0 89664 6476 1520 S  0.0  1.3   0:21.98 beagled
  3949 15   0 86840 9704 3500 S  1.3  1.9   0:40.55 gnome-terminal
  3726 23   0 82188 4220 2192 S  0.0  0.8   0:07.21 gnome-panel
  4017 16   0 81380  560  560 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.07 evolution-data-
  3877 15   0 81072 3060 1828 S  0.0  0.6   2:36.41 clock-applet
  3618 15   0 73008  22m 3476 S  1.7  4.6  27:05.54 Xorg
  3791 15   0 66888 5964 4180 S  0.0  1.2   0:41.61 wnck-applet
  3879 15   0 66160 1064  804 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.90 mixer_applet2
  3710 15   0 65268 1256  920 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.96 gnome-power-man
  3753 15   0 63296 1228  844 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.73 nm-applet
  3978 18   0 58344 1904 1188 S  0.0  0.4   0:02.95 notification-da
  3732 23   0 48748  492  492 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.18 bonobo-activati
  3738 24   0 44344 1012  808 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.09 eggcups
  4701 30  15 35740  14m 7624 S  0.0  2.9   0:01.63 beagled-helper
  3701 15   0 33948 1664 1176 S  0.0  0.3   0:07.33 gnome-settings-
  1952 15   0 33816  17m 2252 S  0.0  3.5   7:14.16 yum-updatesd
  3748 15   0 25140 3856 2228 S  0.0  0.7   0:00.63 puplet
  2923 18   0 22936  456  348 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.36 pcscd
=====
Thanks for any pointers or comparison values. I notice that at least 
clock-applet is no longer consuming tonnes of memory {another machine 
after being up 60 days was using virt 800+MB just for clock applet}.

DaveT