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Extension / Control Panel Memory Usage
Posted by: Phipli on 2022-12-26 08:04:23
Hey folks, are there any utilities that will tell me how much RAM different extensions etc are using? Somethings hogging resources and I'd be interested to approach finding it more directly than uninstalling groups of extenaions 😆
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-12-26 08:13:27
I vaguely remember that Symbionts used to have a go at measuring it?
Posted by: MrFahrenheit on 2022-12-26 10:30:07
Would an extension / control panel ever use more RAM than its file size on disk?
Posted by: Phipli on 2022-12-26 10:39:14
Would an extension / control panel ever use more RAM than its file size on disk?
If it stored data or had a memory leak I guess?
Posted by: Phipli on 2022-12-26 10:40:26
I vaguely remember that Symbionts used to have a go at measuring it?
I'll investigate 🙂 cheers
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-12-26 10:42:21
Would an extension / control panel ever use more RAM than its file size on disk?

Yup. Think about, for example, a tiny little extension that does something simple to every menu any application creates. It may not have much on disc, but it'd need to store information about every menu that every application created, which could be far more data than it had on disc. That memory goes in the same pool as other data owned by the OS, though, which is why it can be hard to work out what memory belongs to what...
Posted by: Crutch on 2022-12-26 11:11:42
I vaguely remember that Symbionts used to have a go at measuring it?

I was not familiar with this, thanks for mentioning. Looks interesting. I will try it …

But for OP’s purposes I am skeptical. It would be easy in principle to measure the memory allocated in the System Heap at INIT time, which is probably of interest, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Probably most INITs patch a trap, and if those patches allocate RAM, it would be a really hard thing, I think, to track each allocation back to the INIT that installed a particular patch.

@Phipli in other words it is possible there is no easy solution other than the old fashioned ‘90s thing of disabling chunks of extensions and seeing what helps…?
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-12-26 11:19:15
It would be easy in principle to measure the memory allocated in the System Heap at INIT time, which is probably of interest, but doesn’t tell the whole story

Yup, I'm pretty sure that's what symbionts does. Which is better than nothing but far from the whole story, as you say.
Posted by: joevt on 2022-12-26 22:08:07
I used Conflict Catcher.
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