http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/1678/
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?

[417 votes] Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #1678


]]> en-us Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:51:06 +0000 Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:42:20 +0000 QAPoll module http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1678/
So, why not system moves swapped data to RAM when RAM becomes available?]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:06:10 +0000
The solution is to use alternatives.]]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:42:21 +0000
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.]]> Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:51:49 +0000 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.]]> Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:51:02 +0000
Decreasing amount of gettys would be easy trick to reduce consumption.]]> Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:01:04 +0000
...FF3 FTW!]]> Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:31:21 +0000 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.]]> Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:09:32 +0000
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).]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:53:29 +0000
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]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:42:36 +0000 Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:59:11 +0000 ]]> Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:19:13 +0000
* 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?]]> Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:22:18 +0000 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.]]> Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:34:18 +0000
279 MB on xorg sounds VERY strange. Could it be compiz?]]> Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:36:09 +0000
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.]]> Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:38:16 +0000
http://lwn.net/Articles/230975/]]> Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:06:14 +0000
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.]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:43:40 +0000
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.]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:33:09 +0000 Sat, 24 May 2008 11:40:23 +0000 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!.]]> Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:04:28 +0000 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.]]> Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:04:20 +0000
- 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.]]> Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:07:50 +0000 Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:33:56 +0000 28MB
:(]]> Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:36:03 +0000