Re: [gentoo-user] KDE ridiculous memory usage

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Alan McKinnon writes:

> Apparently, though unproven, at 16:45 on Saturday 18 September 2010,
> Florian Philipp did opine thusly:

> > I have a bit of a problem. I'm on KDE-4.4.5 and it eats memory for
> > breakfast. Directly after booting, everything is okay but the usage
> > grows significantly. I wonder whether this is expected behavior.
> > 
> > The following statistics have been taken after 8 days of uptime
> > during which the system was on standby most of the time during work
> > days and at night.
> > 
> > free -m
> > 
> >              total  used  free  shared  buffers  cached
> > 
> > Mem:          3754  3588   165       0       57     258
> > -/+ buffers/cache:  3271   482
> > Swap:         6142   978  5163
> > 
> > A desktop machine that has 4GB RAM and still needs to swap?!

What I forgot to ask: Do you feel the performance becomes bad? Does the 
system feel more responsive again when you restart KDM and log in again?

I don't mind the system growing swap, that's normal, but now, as soon as 
significant swapping starts, the system becomes slow. I don't know why.

> > Excerpt from top:
> >  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
> > 
> > 1094m 484m  10m S    0 12.9  96:43.01 firefox
> > 
> >  932m 471m  15m S    0 12.6   5:10.20 akregator
> >  384m 303m 2856 S    0  8.1  59:43.43 virtuoso-t
> >  709m 282m 2936 S    0  7.5   0:40.51 nepomukservices
> >  839m 146m  15m S    0  3.9   8:37.76 thunderbird-bin
> >  191m 131m  532 S    0  3.5  12:30.73 dbus-daemon
> >  902m 105m 5288 S    0  2.8   0:30.16 krunner
> >  263m 105m 1724 S    0  2.8   2:31.18 squid
> >  255m  61m 6672 S    7  1.6 305:04.24 X
> > 
> > 1106m  55m 7756 S    0  1.5   4:22.73 amarok
> > 
> >  534m  54m  10m S    0  1.5   2:33.94 kopete
> >  559m  52m 6536 S    0  1.4  56:52.37 nepomukservices
> >  718m  38m  12m S    4  1.0 143:36.62 plasma-desktop
> >  295m  33m 2048 S    0  0.9   1:59.32 mysqld
> >  360m  17m 1856 S    0  0.5   0:07.56 tomboy
> >  445m  16m 3392 S    0  0.4  38:54.36 nepomukservices
> >  365m  14m 6356 S    1  0.4  27:38.49 konsole
> >  438m  11m 4928 S    0  0.3   0:20.12 kded4
> >  508m  11m 6364 S    0  0.3   0:45.79 kwin
> 
> Like I posted in another thread today, the memory columns in top do not
> mean what most people think they mean, nor are they simplistic.

You gave the example of Thunderbird using 150M and Firefox 180M, but 
together they would not use 330M because some stuff is shared. Hm, isn't 
this what the SHR column in top is for? In Florian's case, there is 
firefox with 484M in the RES column and thunderbird with 146M, but the SHA 
column gives 10M + 15M, so only 25M of 630M are shared?

	Wonko