Linux desktop sluggish over time

[Marc Lanctot]

On Mon, 8 Jun 2009 14:57:54 -0400
lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org (Lennart Sorensen) wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 01:46:05PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> > In general, on UNIX-like systems, when a process terminates, all its
> > temporary resources are reclaimed by the system.
> 
> At least the ones it allocated itself directly from the OS.  Xlib
> allocations don't qualify.
> 
> > Lennart mentioned earlier that X isn't always able to do this.  I
> > don't know what resources may linger.
> 
> For example, if an application wants to allocate a bitmap if can call
> the Xlib function XCreatePixmap, which allocates a bitmap (with
> storage) on the X server and returns a pointer to it to the client.
> THe client can perform various operations with the handle to the
> pixmap, but it is actually stored by the X server.  When done with
> it, the client should call XFreePixmap to tell the server it is done
> with it, so that the server can free the storage for it when there
> are no more users of it.  Of course if the client doesn't do this,
> the X server may not know to clean it up, unless it happens to also
> be vary careful to keep track of which X clients own what pixmaps.  I
> don't think it does that though since nothing says a client couldn't
> pass the pixmap to another client of the same server.
> 

Does anybody know of a TB tool that detects this badness? I could be the
google-data-provider and/or lightning plugin that was leaking it. I
remember it was often TB (sometimes up to 800MB IIRC) and X which has
the most memory, then I'd kill TB and X would still have much more
memory consumption than usual. I don't remember how much better things
became after killing and restarting X. 

Now I am using Claws and it has almost everything I want. AFAICT,
there's no integration to Google calendar (it has a calendar plugin,
though).. but let's see if I can live without that. Of course, Claws
could be as bad with its memory, but I'm hoping the problem was as the
claims have been that it's the netscape libs. 

On to other recommendations. If Firefox has similar issues, is Epiphany
a good alternative? It seems to be so far. I tried Opera and just could
not get accustomed to it. 

That being said, now I have a new problem, also hard to diagnose.
Sometimes, it seems like there's high-latency in my network connection.
It seems like a TCP connection takes 2-3 seconds.. then after that
everything seems to run smoothly, as if I've woken it up out of
"network sleep mode" or something. It doesn't always happen after I've
left the machine idle for a while.. but it could be that I haven't used
the network in a while. I have a
 
  Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5754 Gigabit
  Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)

and I'm using the tg3 network driver (built into the kernel, not as a
module). 

I don't have "NetworkManager" installed, though I could install it. On
Ubuntu/Debian systems I think this is the little app that runs and
shows up as an icon in the top right of the screen.. I never knew what
it's purpose was. It seems to manage connections (on top of making it
easier to add new connections via a GUI), but I have no idea what it
was actually doing in the background. Does anybody know? Should I have
it installed or am I better without it?

Thanks, 
Marc

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and wrong.
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