Entering a user gnome session, going to a terminal and doing a 'ps -ef' lists 5-6 processes of the SAME command. I am concerned about memory usage. For example, 'top' reports that each firefox child requires 3.5% of 1010M of RAM. 5 children means firefox is using 167M of memory which seems a tad high. On another Linux box (FC4) each application has only one process, not several. After closing the application in question, all the processess are killed. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Log in as a user. 2. Load firefox/nautilus/evolution. 3. Look at top/'ps -ef' Actual Results: 5-6 processes were seen each using a chuck of memory acculating to almost 500meg. Expected Results: One process should show for each loaded application. HP Pavilion zd7260us P4 3.2 w/HT Gentoo/FC4/WinXP GNOME 2.1 CFLAGS= -pipe -arch=Pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -O2 nvidia driver, ndiswrapper-1.1
These are not acutally different processes, but multiple threads of the same process. If you try this command: ps -o user,nlwp,args ww --pid $(pgrep -d, -f firefox) And look at the NLWP column, you will see the number of lightweight processes (threads on linux) is >1 (7 in my case). Each of those threads shares the same memory. So, you don't have 7 * 86MB in use, you only have 1 * 86 MB in use.
