|
Description
Linux in general has the reputation of being light and nimble, compared to Windows. However, looking at the memory consumption of a rather standard Ubuntu install with Gnome desktop sadly gives a different picture.
Just looking at residential memory (via top):
345 MB: Firefox
279 MB: Xorg
110 MB: gnome-panel
74 MB: evolution
56 MB: beagled
45 MB: gnome-terminal
42 MB: nautilus
41 MB: beagle-search
32 MB: beagle-helper
20 MB: eog
17 MB: stickynotes_applet
15 MB: nm-applet
11 MB: update-notifier
...
10 MB: cpufreq-applet
10 MB: charpick_applet
8 MB: trashapplet
So, what I'm seeing is that some of the core apps are rather excessive (supposedly Firefox 3 will be better, yes?) But somehow, I can almost understand that.
However, why do little applets and utilities like the update-manager have to consume SO much memory? In fact, shouldn't the update-notifier just be a cron job that gets executed occasionally, and then loads more stuff to notify me on the screen?
Why do all the applets that are displayed on the desktop consume several MBs?
Why does the gnome-panel consume more than 100 MB?
I don't know the reason, but I could imagine that some of these things (beagle, for example) use Mono, which apparently is a memory hog. But do all of them? No, I don't think so.
It would be great if more attention could be paid to overall memory footprint reduction. There are lots of nice applets available, but I'm thinking twice before installing them, considering the RAM they consume.
Let Ubuntu be light and nimble. Let's show the world that you don't need 2 GB of RAM to work well.
How about a memory-footprint reduction initiative, or drive?
Attachments
No attachments.
Duplicates
Comments
|
alperyilmaz wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 19:06
|
Another problem I observe frequently is that, when a memory-monster application is started, a lot of swapping occurs. That's normal and there's nothing to about it if you don't have much RAM. However, when you are done with that application, you close it and expect that the swapped data will be taken back to RAM, but NO! Everything swapped stays as swapped. So, even though you have available memory, swapped applications respond slow since they need to be moved to RAM again.
So, why not system moves swapped data to RAM when RAM becomes available?
|
|
Areso wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 19:42
|
It is a problem of these applications and their design, the chosen programming environment etc.
The solution is to use alternatives.
|
|
Estesark wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 02:51
|
Your memory consumption seems rather high compared to mine - some applications in that list are 50% higher. How much RAM do you have installed?
Although Canonical/Ubuntu should do everything they can, it is, in the end, the application designer's responsibility and prerogative and reduce or optimise memory consumption, and the consumer's right to switch to an alternative if they are unhappy.
|
|
maco wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 10:51
|
I'm using Hardy, and here's what I've got:
Firefox 3: 181MB
Xorg: 71MB
Gnome-Panel: 20MB
Gnome-Terminal: 16MB
Nautilus: 31MB
NM-Applet: 9MB
Everything else you listed, I don't have running. I have 1GB in use total right now. Firefox's 181MB is the highest. 2nd is MythTV with 92MB (plus all the plugins I have going...transcoding movies is rather resource-intensive in general), then Sunbird with 82MB, then Nautilus's 31MB, then Pidgin with 26MB...and actually I see that trackerd is running for no good reason ("no good reason" = "I disabled everywhere I saw it"), as is Seahorse's daemon, so I'm going to go reclaim about 10MB of RAM.
|
|
rawsausage wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 22:01
|
Your Xorg will stop leaking as much when you move into Firefox 3. The Firefox 2.x used X's bitmap cache and often forgot to release the memory. As for what comes to to the rest the state has improved slightly. Especially system-monitor has improved a lot.
Decreasing amount of gettys would be easy trick to reduce consumption.
|
|
ethana2 wrote on the 2 Mar 08 at 08:31
|
I've never seen numbers like that on my system. Ever.
...FF3 FTW!
|
|
aschuring wrote on the 2 Mar 08 at 13:09
|
Are you sure you're looking at residential memory? Here's my list:
VIRT RES COMMAND
171m 72m firefox-bin
153m 46m thunderbird-bin
140m 64m /usr/bin/quodlibet
69492 16m gnome-terminal
21272 12m rtorrent
38812 10m gnome-settings-daemon
292m 15m Xorg
23576 16m enlightenment
124m 24m mysqld
All other programs are not even expressed in terms of XXm
So that's 40M for the GUI (granted, it's not Gnome), everything else (esp. application memory footprint) is more or less outside of the scope of Ubuntu.
|
|
asashnov wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 05:53
|
jbrendel, do you use 64-bit version?
in 64-bit all size_t and void* are 8 bytes instead of 4.
When same programm alloc some number of objects in heap, on 64-bytes heap administrative data more then on 32-bit.
So if you not have 4 Gb ram, use 32-bit version (all 64-bit processor features even still in use).
|
|
Dreamsorcerer wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 14:42
|
I also cannot believe it is that high, here is mine running on 512MB RAM:
235MB firefox-bin
60MB Xorg
15MB pidgin
15MB evolution
14MB amarokapp
13MB python
13MB nautilus
13MB python
11MB gnome-panel
11MB python
9.8MB gnome-terminal
9.6MB python
8.6MB deskbar-applet
8MB gweather-applet
7.4MB stickynotes_app
6.8MB gtk-window-deco
6.6MB python
|
|
spyyder wrote on the 5 Mar 08 at 00:59
| |
No reason we can't imporve on memory useage. LETS RAISE THE BAR!
|
|
Auzy wrote on the 5 Mar 08 at 05:19
|
I agree about some things, but some of it (like firefox's usage) is probably stuff like caching.
|
|
jbrendel wrote on the 7 Mar 08 at 02:22
|
This was taken after my system was up for more than a week, with heavy desktop use every day. I did a reboot today, and the numbers have somewhat decreased (posted below). Still, it all seems very high.
* Yes, I am looking at the RES column of the 'top' output.
* I have 2 GB RAM.
* Caching in Firefox is set to not more than 5 MB.
* No, I'm not using 64 bit.
168 MB: Firefox
130 MB: Xorg
59 MB: skype
57 MB: beagled
47 MB: evolution
34 MB: gnome-panel
33 MB: beagle-search
31 MB: nautilus
...
18 MB: eog
So, it has slightly improved. But doesn't it still appear very high? And why did it get so very high in the first place?
|
|
vexorian wrote on the 7 Mar 08 at 14:34
|
That's odd.
I don't use that much memory.
firefox-bin 87 MB
java 54.1 MB (not by ubuntu's default)
java 16.1 MB (another one not by ubuntu)
gnome-panel 13.0 MB
nautilus 11.1MB
geany 10.3 MB (not ubuntu's default)
gnome-system-monitor
5.4 MB (I opened this to see the memory usage...)
After that, there are some processes with memory quantities I don't really think are important / got lazy to copy it all.
Regarding swapping, I think ubuntu should have decreased swappiness or configure it according to RAM memory, I got 768 MB but it wasn't using much of it (used swapping instead) until I manually increased the kernle's swappines.
|
|
vexorian wrote on the 7 Mar 08 at 14:36
|
Just noticed gnome-system-monitor does not show root's xorg, it takes 55 MB on mine.
279 MB on xorg sounds VERY strange. Could it be compiz?
|
|
vexorian wrote on the 7 Mar 08 at 14:38
|
jbrendel: you got 2GB of RAM? Could it be processes use more memory if possible?
In most of my ubuntu life, the worst memory hogs I've seen were:
- virtual box running XP (totally justified though)
- war3.exe ( :) )
- firefox (It doesn't use a lot of memory but it is mostly always in the top with around 90 MB)
Too good firefox is improving in that area with version 3.
|
|
jsnow wrote on the 20 Mar 08 at 03:06
|
I think we need better tools for understanding memory use. A lot of programs appear to be using more memory than they really are because they're linked with shared libraries used by other programs as well.
http://lwn.net/Articles/230975/
|
|
dustigroove wrote on the 25 Mar 08 at 01:43
|
+1 in my book.
And on a tangent... I sincerely don't understand folks who claim that suggestions are "outside the scope" of Canonical/Ubuntu. I call BS. The purpose of this site is for us to express ideas to improve upon the Ubuntu landscape, and as much of the ideas suggestions pertain to features found within the stock Ubuntu (thus the product "as sold" so-to-speak) it is fully within the scope of suggestion.
This is our voice and place to be heard, if the ideas are sound and in demand then the powers that be can assist in driving for those changes.
|
|
neomenlo wrote on the 25 Mar 08 at 23:33
|
Judging by all these peoples stats, it seems that the more ram you have, the more ram the program eats up. Is that possible?
I've got 3GB and I usually have:
Firefox: 300 - 500
Pidgin: 100 - 250
Xorg: 200
Evolution: 10 - 150
Azureus: 100 - 200
even screenlets sometimes end up with 50 over time.
Before you over react to the extraordinarily high ram usage for Firefox, I do have 5 windows open with at least 5 tabs in each of them, so it's probably justified.
I can actually understand most of those, but pidgin is the most shocking one to me. It's just text.
|
|
LostOverThere wrote on the 24 May 08 at 11:40
| |
Why the Hell does the gnome-panel need that much ram? That's disgusting!
|
|
Vladimir Hidalgo wrote on the 5 Jun 08 at 13:04
|
Mem: 502M used: 187M buffers: 66M cache:241M
RES %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
50m 0.0 10.0 0:35.74 epiphany-browse
44m 1.6 8.8 10:29.15 gnome-panel
22m 5.4 4.6 0:06.63 gnome-terminal
20m 0.2 4.1 0:06.61 nautilus
16m 4.8 3.2 4:48.55 Xorg
13m 0.0 2.7 0:00.77 mixer_applet2
13m 0.0 2.6 0:00.68 python
12m 3.5 2.5 1:27.14 metacity
11m 0.2 2.2 0:04.63 nm-applet
11m 0.2 2.2 0:02.66 gnome-settings-
10m 0.9 2.0 0:42.06 xmms
10m 0.0 1.8 2:59.04 squid3
Ubuntu 7.10 with 512M of ram. Seems to me that most of the memory is used by Cache (and it's good AFAIK).
But I wonder why gnome-panel takes 44m?, and why a simple applet like the mixer_applet2 takes 13m!.
|
|
TWO wrote on the 1 Jul 08 at 16:04
|
Firefox 34MB
Gnome Panel 31MB
beagled 26MB
...
Your memory seems extremely high.
How many extra things such as applets do you have installed? Why not just get rid of things like Evolution so that they don't bother you or just disable them from starting up in the first place.
I don't know what you do on your computer but I have half of your RAM, and my Firefox cache is set at a much higher value than your and yet the only time I see excessive use of memory is when Java is running.
You can make changes to your system to stop things from consuming so much memory, and consider reducing the swappiness value to a lower number.
I am all for low RAM consumption so either way, it's a +1 from me.
|
|
cheesehead wrote on the 18 Jul 08 at 18:07
|
update-notifier, for example, does several things:
- It controls the little apt-lock icon in your notification area.
- When new updates are available, it downloads them in the background.
- It reminds you to launch Update Manager at the interval you specify.
My non-geek grandma likes the convenience of specifying the update preferences, and pay the RAM overhead for the service.
I, however, uninstalled it on my machine and replaced it with a cron job.
Ubuntu is meant for my grandma, but offers me the flexibility to do it my way, too. Good balance.
|
|
migueleonm wrote on the 5 Aug 08 at 06:33
| |
If you have a large SWAP, many ram will be consumed because the system try to paginate the swap... WIth 2GB of RAM you only need 1GB of swap or less... I'll try 600MB.
|
Post your comment
|
