Please help me understand how programs are layered

[Dotan Cohen]

On 04/10/06, Dariusz J. Garbowski <thuforuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 10/03/2006 11:01 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > On 03/10/06, Dariusz J. Garbowski <thuforuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> >> On 10/03/2006 08:00 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> >>
> >>> Thanks for the info. Nothing I've been able to google has explained
> >>> this very well, for non-developers like myself.
> >> Hope this helps :-)
> >>
> >
> > That does help, thanks. I now understand that a program like F-Spot,
> > which is a "gnome app" must have gnome installed and will not run on a
> > KDE-only system. So, if I want to lean out my system, I must find a
> > KDE replacement for F-Spot.
> >
> > Tell me, does having Gnome stuff running in the background slow down
> > KDE?
>
> Yes and no. Not by itself, but yes by resource consumption, e.g. memory
> (like you mention below).
>
>
> > For instance, if I fire up F-Spot, will it use considerably most
> > system resources than, say, DigiKam, because it must load the gnome
> > libraries? Am I essentially, then, running two desktops at once and
> > therefore killing the computer?
>
> Not exactly two desktops, e.g you will run only one window manager,
> panel(s) from one desktop only, etc. But Gnome application running in
> KDE will load a bunch of Gnome libs (and vice versa).
>
>
> > I'm on a 1.2 gHz Duron processor with
> > 512MB ram, and I feel that the system is extremly slow. Would I be
> > best off eliminating the Gnome apps?
>
> That would help, especially due to memory limit.
>
>
> > How can I know, before starting a
> > program, what libraries it will load, and therefore how much resouces
> > it will take?
>
> You can get some indication of that using ldd command, for example try:
>
> $ ldd /usr/bin/top
> ...
> $ ldd /usr/bin/k3b
> ...
>
> This works for dynamically linked applications (which are usually in
> majority on Linux systems) by printing shared library dependencies.
>
> You can also use command line "top" or KDE's KSysGuard to monitor how
> much memory an application uses. There is however important thing to
> remember -- dynamically linked executables share libraries, i.e. if you
> run 5 Gnome apps they will definitely share Gnome libraries rather than
> each of the apps loading libs separately.
>
> There's also more advanced "strace"...
>
> Regards,
> Dariusz
>

Thanks. I'd like to see how much of a performance hit F-Spot makes,
rather than Digikam.

Dotan Cohen
http://technology-sleuth.com