(Kubuntu 10.04) Memory usage unreasonable high?

[Jonathan Thomas]

On Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:58:39 pm Tomas Gustavsson wrote:
> Is it just me or is the memory usage of Kubuntu 10.04 
unreasonable
> high? I know that it's still in the alpha stages but it seems 
a little
> too high here. If I disregard Konqueror from the total memory 
usage
> it's still around 750 MiB (stabilised to 720 after 10 mins or 
so), out
> of 2.9GiB according to ksysguard.

Linux uses unused memory as a cache, so high or near-full RAM 
usage is a sign that the kernel is doing it's job properly and 
is efficiently using your RAM to make your applications faster. 
If an application needs more RAM, it will dump some of the cache 
and the application will be able to use this newly-freed RAM.

So, don't take the RAM usage numbers you see to mean that 
Kubuntu is taking an unholy amount of memory. There's no point 
in having memory sit around doing nothing, and if an application 
needs more RAM the kernel will simply use less for the cache and 
give the application more RAM when it requests it.

> 
> I know that KDE may be more for "power users" then GNOME is, 
but still
> something must be wrong if Kubuntu draws almost 3 times the 
memory
> compared to Ubuntu. Or is it that KDE somehow reserves more 
memory
> then GNOME and doesn't actually uses 750MiB of my memory?
> 
> There's no doubt in my mind that Kubuntu is becoming a better 
every
> day, but there must be a healthy balance between the resource 
usage
> and the functionalities.

GNOME behaves this way in regards to memory usage too, but due 
to differences in every single tool ever created to view RAM 
usage, numbers are often different between all the tools, and 
can be quite a bit misleading. KInfoCenter may help a bit here, 
as it's Memory section gives details about how memory is divided 
up into stuff that applications are using, stuff the system is 
using for caching, etc.

Hope this helps,
Jonathan Thomas