Florian Philipp writes:
> 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.
I was just about to write something about this. I suffered from bad
performance for quite a while now (like mplayer stuttering during
emerges), started a thread in in the gentoo-performance list and got some
advice that made things a little better, but I suspect the effect came
from reduced memory usage only. Since yesterday the problems all seem to
be gone, but again it's not a real solution, as I plugged in another 2GB
of memory, so now I have 6G.
I used to restart kdm once per day in order to free memory. If I did not
do this, KDE4 became nearly unsusabe.
> 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?!
After 1 day of uptime, my system needs even more, but I'm also running
some stuff.
wo...@weird ~ $ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 5721 5618 103 0 112 1108
-/+ buffers/cache: 4397 1323
Swap: 4094 50 4044
> 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
Now this looks different here. I have X with 946M, plasma-desktop with
505M, that's 15 times the memory you need. Then comes java with 371M (for
TV-Browser - yes, 371MB just for showing the TV programme!), emerge wants
272M while emerging openoffice. Chromium also needs much memory, my 33
tabs want 762M:
VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1722m 946m 22m R 24 16.5 217:29.77 X
1728m 504m 23m S 0 8.8 61:07.82 plasma-desktop
2018m 371m 6772 S 0 6.5 2:45.60 java
379m 272m 1884 S 0 4.8 4:39.50 emerge
2632m 127m 11m S 0 2.2 6:48.31 pica
694m 123m 21m S 0 2.2 11:28.50 kontact
1246m 117m 20m S 0 2.1 27:30.34 amarok
757m 101m 86m S 0 1.8 116:20.68 vmware-vmx
946m 94m 10m S 0 1.7 1:37.32 chrome
682m 91m 15m S 0 1.6 4:22.98 chrome
494m 79m 14m S 0 1.4 0:40.28 kmymoney
929m 61m 13m S 0 1.1 2:29.96 chrome
328m 56m 5084 S 0 1.0 1:46.09 kio_imap4
73712 49m 616 S 0 0.9 0:10.79 screen
921m 48m 30m S 0 0.8 0:01.62 systemsettings
573m 46m 14m S 0 0.8 1:36.06 dolphin
> Okay, I'm used to Firefox taking much memory. I'm okay with that since
> it's the most heavily used application currently running. But why does
> Akregator need that much memory? It doesn't even have any tabs open at
> the moment and is just running minimized in the background.
Beats me.
> Virtuoso looks like an optional Soprano dependency which in turn is
> needed for Nepomuk. Are the default use flags for dev-libs/soprano
> suboptimal? What happens if I choose other flags for Soprano?
Don't know. But you can just turn off virtuoso in systemsettings-> desktop
search.
I just turned it on again, and - now I need 271M of swap, and again my
system becomes unresponsive due to the constant swapping that is going on.
With 6G!
Which is another problem I think. One question is how KDE4 can need such a
lot of memory, the other is how the system can become so unresponsive once
its starts swapping. I used to have larger swap with less RAM, and did not
have those performance problems. One year ago I usually had 2G tmpfs for
/var/tmp/portage, nowadays (with 4G) I cannot emerge things while working
with the system (like, watching videos with mplayer). It feels like as
soon as RAM is not enough and swapping occurs, the system swaps stuff that
it will need again immediately.
What stuff do I run? I have 8 activities/desktops, there are some
screenshots at [1] in case someone is interested. My default session has 4
konsoles with a total of 8 tabs, 3 dolphins with 5 views, amarok, kontact,
kmymoney2. TV-Browser (java application which eats a lot of memory), some
admin tools like gkrellm or diagnostic plasmoids. And a lot of browser
tabs, around 30. Currently I'm using chromium, that seems to use less
memory than konqueror. The number of tabs increases with uptime. Is this
too much? Desktop effects are enabled. Today I started openoffice once,
played a little quake3. There is a windows VM running with vmplayer, but
that takes only 50MB. wine uses more, I'm using this today, but normally
not.
The system is an AMD Athlon 4850e (2 cores, 2500MHz) with 4GB of RAM.
Everything is on LVM, most partitions are LUKS-encrypted. /var/tmp/portage
is unencrypted, and at the moment swap is also not encrypted and on my 2nd
drive. The encryption does not be much of an overhead, when the system
stutters, top shows a large wa(it) value, and not much CPU usage. swappiness
is set to 10.
Any ideas? I might just get another 2G, and then the problems will be gone,
but I think this would be only a workaround. 6G should be enough already
even when using lots of applications, shouldn't it`?
BTW, I emerged and tried KDE 3.5 a week ago. Cool, things were fast
there. Probably because it needs less memory. But I don't want to go back.
Wonko
[1]
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-performance/msg_e4365aee884ee527dc8fb82d2c725ec4.xml
