Stability and Memory Pressure in 8.2

[Gary C Martin]

On 10 Sep 2008, at 00:11, Gary C Martin wrote:

> SUMMARY: 759 vs 711 is only eating an extra ~16Mb of ram after a clean
> boot (no running Activities)
>
>
> **I'll try and test several Activity versions that can run on both
> builds and see how their individual resources have changed, will post
> later.

OK, news is not great on the Activity front...

SUMMARY: 759 vs 711 each Activity instance in 759 consumes an average  
of 1Mb more memory than the same Activity running in 711, with  
Write-57 reportedly taking significantly more than that (perhaps ~7Mb).

Is top and/or ps memory usage calculated in the same way between these  
builds? Could make collecting real data pretty painful.

Tests were taken after clean reboots and allowing things to settle  
(~5min); five activities were launched in order Moon-4, Write-57,  
Record-57, Paint-20, and Calculate-23; Journal was made the current  
Activity and the view was switched to home; data collected via a  
remote ssh session. Wanted to test Browse as it's a known memory eater  
(well most browsers are), but will need to dig out the most recent  
version that works with 711 for a reasonable comparison.

With all five Activities launched, free buffers/cache reported 5m more  
memory was being used under 759. Looking at each Activity's foot print  
shows 759 all having less shared memory, and more resident and data  
memory.

Write-57
759 -> 15.5% (RES=35m, SHR=13m, DATA=20m)
711 -> 12.4% (RES=28m, SHR=15m, DATA=11m)

Record-57
759 -> 14.2% (RES=32m, SHR=14m, DATA=64m)
711 -> 13.1% (RES=30m, SHR=16m, DATA=61m)

Calculate-23
759 -> 10.6% (RES=24m, SHR=8m, DATA=15m)
711 -> 10.1% (RES=23m, SHR=10m, DATA=11m)

Paint-20
759 -> 10.1% (RES=23m, SHR=8m, DATA=14m)
711 -> 9.6% (RES=22m, SHR=10m, DATA=10m)

Moon-4
759 -> 9.7% (RES=22m, SHR=8m, DATA=13m)
711 -> 9.2% (RES=21m, SHR=11m, DATA=10m)

Well, I was hoping to see the numbers go the other way with the  
rainbow fork trick sharing more module code between Activities. Could  
be worse I guess – I should also test opening N instances of the same  
Activity and see which way memory usage has moved in that scenario.

--Gary

P.S. No body spotted my intentional 771 mistake in the last email, it  
was of obviously meant to be 711 :)