Ok, so after some mail activity Benoit created a patch which displays ‘writeable memory’ in the GUI, which gives a better approximation of actual usage compared to the older numbers. Waldo Bastien pointed me to a blog entry from Lubos Lunak about a tool called exmap which displays something its calls ‘effective memory’ which Lubos thinks is a relativly decent value for describing how much memory an application actually use. I made a screenshot showing both the patched gnome system monitor and exmap displaying the memory usage of the clock applet. If those numbers are to believed the clock applet uses somewhere between 3 and 6 MB of memory, which might seem a bit on the high side. (but lets remember that the ‘clock applet’ is not just a clock, its a calendering application integrating with evolution data server giving you an overview of your monthly meetings etc.).
Anecdotaly exmap is the first app I ever used outside the Mandrake admin tools which use the perl-GTK2 bindings to write its GUI. Maybe there still is some hope for Perl :)
Not sure panel-applets are a good/easy testcase for memory measurement, so I looked at X-Chat using these new numbers too, exmap reports effective memory usage of 3.6 MB, g-s-m reports writeable memory at 8MB and resident memory of 11.6MB (resident memory number seemed to be the ‘old’ number people tended to be using when discussing memory usage).
dams has written a few apps that use it. He wrote a layer on top of the perl-gtk stuff called gtk2-fu (http://search.cpan.org/~dams/Gtk2Fu-0.10/), which he’s used to write apps like http://libconf.net/profuse/.