From: bruce@blilly.UUCP (Bruce Lilly)
Subject: Re: New WMGR
Organization: Bruce Lilly
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 92 00:26:52 GMT
Reply-To: lilb@sony.compuserve.com

In article <953@hawkeye.hawkeye.com> mps@hawkeye.hawkeye.com (Michael Snyder) wrote:
>From article <Bxnx1n.859@zero.com>, by steve@zero.com (Steve Urich):
>> 
>> Yes this is a good suggestion. I got it and it also fixed the memory
>> leak that was talked about when wmgr gets more then one login window
>> when you make more in the inittab. It used to creep up until the

The memory leak is exhibited as new windows are created and
deleted (e.g. by windy -b).

>The 'new' wmgr mentioned above appears to be either a part of base 3.51 or
>was on FIXDISK2.0, as my system already has the features mentioned as part
>of the one on OSU-CIS.  The following output from "what" shows what's here
>on hawkeye:
>
>/etc/wmgr:
>	 wmgr:wmgr.sl 1.8 

That one differs significantly from the one on osu-cis. See below.

>I've seen somewhere (another followup) that the one on OSU comes back from
>"what" with version 1.7.  

Right. Assuming a progression of version numbers, that would
indicate that the one on osu-cis is not ``new'', but *old*.

>  With the 1.8 version, I have run 37 days with two
>gettys running on window devices (may have gone longer... rural power :-)
>and have no known memory leak problems with any processes.

The memory leak causes the size of wmgr itself to increase as
windows are created and destroyed. Having N windows open won't
show the problem unless some are closed and new ones opened. No
other programs are directly affected; the size increase of wmgr
itself causes a noticeable performance decrease, especially when
switching between windows, due to the necessity to page and/or
swap the increased wmgr process.

The 1.8 version is either from 3.51 or FIXDISK2, and has the
memory leak problem (the operation has been the same here, from
original 3.51 through 3.51m, so I suspect 1.8 came with the
original 3.51--1.7 certainly wasn't with 3.51).  So far, I
haven't seen any evidence of memory leak with 1.7:

ps -elf | egrep "wmgr|RSZ"

  F S    UID   PID  PPID  C PRI NI ADR SZ:RSZ   WCHAN   STIME  TTY  TIME COMD
  1 S   root  8992     1  3  27 20 147  6: 12   5bf14 20:11:19  w3  0:46 wmgr

With wmgr.sl 1.8, the SZ and RSZ fields will increase as windows
are created and destroyed (apparently memory is malloc'ed each
time a window is created, but is not free'd when the window is
destroyed).

wmgr.sl 1.7 differs from 1.8 in its use of the Suspend, Resume,
Shift-Suspend and Shift-Resume keys:

Key                1.7                          1.8
Suspend        Window menu                Window menu
Resume         switch to previous window  Window menu
Shift-Suspend  Window menu                switch to previous window
Shift-Resume   switch to next window      switch to next window

After 4 years of training, it's difficult to retrain one's
fingers :-(.  But not having to contend with the memory leak
(assuming it doesn't show up as I open and close more windows)
is a big plus--I'll stick with this old version unless it shows
up some major bug(s).

Any AT&T'ers or Convergent folks have access to the revision
history for wmgr?  Aside from the obvious operational change
w.r.t. Suspend/Resume etc., and the presumably unintentional
introduction of a memory leak, what changed from 1.7 to 1.8?
Am I giving up any features by going backwards to 1.7? Can I
expect to see some bug(s) which was/were fixed by the change to
1.8?

-- 
	Bruce Lilly		blilly!bruce@Broadcast.Sony.COM
					...uunet!sonyusa!sonyd1!blilly!bruce
Newsgroups: comp.sys.3b1