Bug 76710

This is caused by a memory leak in Xft on X servers without the "render"
extension. It will work fine on X servers that have render.

Right.  But even in the box where gnome-terminal works it still eats something 
like 20 megs of memory.  And I don't use anything fancy like transparent 
backgrounds.
<p>
20 megs for a mere terminal emulator is a bug don't you think?

It depends on your setup. My gnome-terminal processes have something like 5392K 
used of which 3492K is shared. But I have only one terminal window per 
gnome-terminal process because I use --disable-factory.

Each terminal tab or window will add the scrollback buffer size to your footprint.
Note that all terminal windows are in the same process by default.
Check your scrollback buffer size in prefs.

I was using the _default_ parms like shipped by Redhat and with only the initial
tab.   IMHO if a mere terminal emulator eats nearly twenty megs with default
parms then it is a bug either in the program or in the fact those parms are
deafult.  Also I have problems envisionning what additional functionality a mere
terminal emulator could provide me whose value is worth 15 additional megs
(respactive to --nofactory) of memory use.  I know memory is cheap nowadays but
my 128M box is not worth to be upgraded and I will have to cope with it for an
additional year. :-)

Any defaults can use unlimited RAM, it has to do with how many windows/tabs you
open. How many do you have open when you see that much memory usage?

The primary factors in mem usage will be number of windows, and scrollback
buffer size. The default scrollback size is IMO reasonable. Number of
windows/tabs, we have no control over.

No tab or window but the implicit one.  It is on a fresh gome-terminal from a
fresh session from a freshly rebooted machine (ie there are no old terminals
hanging around who could confuse me).

My terminal isn't close to 20M in that situation, there's something weird going on.

Perhaps it is because I made an "everything" installation.   Thus I probable I
still have fonts for exotic languages and perhaps gnome-terminal has loaded them
all.  Of course it should not load unneeded fonts 

BTW IMHO anaconda should be smarter about the "everything" installation:  some
people like myself could want all the software but that does not mean we want
man pages in finnish and chinese fonts: it should install only the docs and
fonts required for the languages selected by the user.

Returning to our subject perhaps it is related to color depth (24bpp) or the NV
driver used by my NVidia card (I use the vanilla one shipped by RedHat).

Since I have ADSL I can send you any core file/strace/ltrace output you require

I have found that the output of ps is misleading.  Not only it does not properly
account for shared memory but sometimes I have found that total memory used by
system was X mags (with zero pages in swap used) while a _single_ program had a
DRS far superior to X.  Looks like all of shared libraries are mapped into DRS
even when using only a liitle part of them (I thougt they were mapped into the
text segment).
<p>
That means apparent memory consumption of gnome-terminal (in normal case not
when hitting the memory leaks on lack of RENDER extension) is not as high as it
looks.
I think we can close this bug. 

"top" and "gnome-system-monitor" give more heuristic memory usage output, 
that may be more in line with what one expects.

Closing then, thanks.