castanyes blaves

What it seemed to be doing was loading some large xml (bloat sign #1: large xml document) on initialization (bloat sign #2: said large documents loaded at startup), copying it to memory (bloat sign #3: said large documents being copied with malloc).

Federico encourged me to find out exactly why this was happening. What I found simply shocked me.

We were using this in a file called `acme-volume-gstreamer.c'. Yes, we are loading 300 kb of data from an xml file at bootup time to control the volume of the computer.

In other news, gstreamer and gnome-settings-daemon are not the only bloatware on the block. Some of the glutinous usages of memory found over the weekend include:

* Bonobo loading the entire (read 80 kb) locale.alias file into 100 kb of ram for every program that uses it

* gnome-vfs initing the mime system in gnome-settings-daemon, causing ~ 160 kb of allocations, just to find out who handles `text/plain'

* Nautilus keeping two copies of the desktop background in ram (on NLD it costs about 13 mb to have a desktop background, over a plain color).

* Nautilus keeping a few 100 kb of data stored in xml files as is parsed by libxml2 (aka, bloated storage format [TM])

* The clock, wnck, and notification applet being run out of process, costing 1 MB each due to startup costs of misc libraries

The list goes on.

Lets fix this shit once 2.10 gets released.