[Opera-Linux] Huge-memory-suckage-uppage update

[Eirik Byrkjeflot Anonsen]

Kenneth Crudup <kenny at panix.com> writes:

> On Wed, 24 Jun 2009, Eirik Byrkjeflot Anonsen wrote:
>
>> Maybe.  Of course, since opera for linux runs the plug-ins themselves in
>> their own processes, memory used by the plug-ins should not show up in
>> the memory size of the opera process.  But plug-ins may request various
>> things from opera, and maybe some of that causes opera to use lots of
>> memory.
>
>> > ... [then] reinstall the 64-bit, shared Beta and turn off Plugins to
>> > see if I can figure out what's making Opera grow to many GB in size.
>
>> Yes, that sounds like a useful test.
>
> Get this- Opera Beta 64-bit with plugins turned off just *shrank* from
> 3.5G VM to 1.8GB VM, under a normal browsing mode. I had to check it
> three times to make sure I'm not insane. :)

Then again, what was it doing with that 3.5GB to begin with?

It certainly can happen.  If opera for some reason uses a lot of memory
for a short time, and leaves an allocation alive at a high address.  Due
to the way traditional unix memory allocation typically works, no memory
will be returned to the system until that particular allocation is
freed.  (That's only partially true, but it is a possible explanation).
But that doesn't explain why opera thought allocating 3.5 GB in the
first place was a good idea...

eirik