Re: [forum] bloatware

[Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 05:12:57PM -0500, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
> 
>   This brings up the question... Why is it that top and ps include
> virtual mappings that don't take up and real memory or swap?
> Is it useful the way it is now?  It's certainly misleading.

Many people I've talked to insist that it is somehow inaccurate to
have a column labeled "SIZE" or "MEMORY" that just displays how much
real memory a process is responsible for using up - they claim it is
too hard to define what "responsible for" means, and that knowing the
exact details is useful in some cases.

I claim that in practice there is a reasonable heuristic for
"responsible for", and that 99% of the time people don't understand or
want the exact details so they could be made
hidden/optional/nondefault, and that the FAQs caused by people not
understanding the exact details are getting really tiresome. ;-)

Havoc