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What on Earth is causing this program to use 100 MB of memory?
I'm new to Songbird, and I have to say, I'm impressed. I don't have any issues with the program's layout, and Last.FM integration is very simple and easy. One thing really bothers me, though, and that's the fact that even though Songbird appears minimal and cleaned, is that it uses 100+ MB of RAM.
I know this is not a new problem, but I am very curious as to why exactly this is. It's not a memory leak, it starts out right around 100 MB. Is it the integrated web browser? If so, why on Earth isn't it optional?
I want to continue using Songbird, but goodness, this is definitely excessive for a media player! Is there any work being done on finding out what exactly the problem is here, and if so, how long until this could be resolved?
I know this is not a new problem, but I am very curious as to why exactly this is. It's not a memory leak, it starts out right around 100 MB. Is it the integrated web browser? If so, why on Earth isn't it optional?
I want to continue using Songbird, but goodness, this is definitely excessive for a media player! Is there any work being done on finding out what exactly the problem is here, and if so, how long until this could be resolved?
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?I'll start by saying I'm not a Songbird dev, and these are purely my own observations from using Songbird on Win7.
The Songbird directory contains 171 dll files, including 70 gstreamer (Songbird's media core) plugins. Songbird loads most, if not all, of these files every time it runs. By comparison, my Firefox 3.5 directory contains 21 dll files. I don't know what the overhead of loading dll files is but I'm sure it's not negligible, at least for that many.
Just as an experiment I deleted 21 gstreamer plugins that I know I don't use (mostly video plugins, since video's not even supported by Songbird yet). The total size of the files deleted was 4.5MiB. Songbird start-up memory usage was reduced by ~8MiB. From other stuff I've done with gstreamer I would guess that gstreamer accounts for 35-40MiB of Songbird's memory usage, at least while playing. I would guess that consolidating dll files and possibly loading gstreamer plugins on demand (if that's even possible) is the best thing that could bring memory usage down without negatively impacting performance.
Obviously, web browsing and a large music library, as well as addons also increase Songbird's memory usage, but I'm not sure how much could be trimmed without removing functionality. As I understand it, Songbird also allocates memory based on how much memory your system has available, so it will use more if you have more to increase performance.
This topic maybe should be merged with Lightweight and quicker songbird.1 Comment
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This answers the question
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Hm, so these plugins are used by Songbird to make it, well, pretty much what it is, is that right? In that case, there's not a whole lot that can be done to trim memory usage, other than using these plugins more efficiently, which from what I understand is likely to be a slow process. The high memory usage isn't a terrible deal for me, to be honest. 4 GB of memory is very plentiful. I just want to know what exactly goes on that causes such a small looking program to use so much memory. Even with a large amount of RAM, the less you lose, the more you have available! -
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Inappropriate?I'm not a dev, but I can't get mine to exceed 86mb RAM usage on Windows 7.. If I remove extensions and such, I could probably get it to 60MB.
However, in terms of the webbrowser consuming ram, you must realise that Songbird is technically in many ways a rendered webpage (same as Firefox). It uses XUL and other such technologies. It cant be removed, or nothing would work.
Memory has greatly decreased though from what it started off to be. When 0.7 was out, it was consuming 150MB or more in ram. So that means they managed to reduce my ram usage by half over the past year, and they seem to be actively working towards better all the time. And more changes are scheduled (even for Jackson 5). I would also imagine that when the Firefox 3.5 Gecko core (Mozilla central) gets added, that we'll see major changes in the way Songbird runs.
But overall, I have 4GB of ram too. Whilst Songbird is a bit sluggish at this time in areas, I strongly believe that Kanye will fix that (it separates the GUI thread from the library thread so the interface stops freezing, and hopefully the Firefox 3.5 core will be added). And since I have plenty of excess ram, I don't really mind the 30mb extra RAM songbird uses over Winamp. Especially because I greatly prefer the available extensions on Songbird.
CHAMP
