Apparently, though unproven, at 13:34 on Sunday 19 September 2010, Alex Schuster did opine thusly:
> 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. It's swapping. It will become slow. Disks are millions of time slower than RAM. > > > > 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? Yes that's true. I sucked the 150 && 180 numbers out of my ass. The post was to highlight common problems with reading top output, not to diagnose any problem he might be having. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
