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