(Kubuntu 10.04) Memory usage unreasonable high?

[Tomas Gustavsson]

2010/1/15 Jonathan Thomas <echidnaman at gmail.com>

> 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
>
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So are you saying that there ain't any practical way of knowing how much
memory an application is using? And is it possible somehow to hide memory
from the system? Let's assume that I wanna try and see how the system
behaves with just 512 MiB of memory or so?
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