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Florian Philipp writes: |
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> I have a bit of a problem. I'm on KDE-4.4.5 and it eats memory for |
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> breakfast. Directly after booting, everything is okay but the usage |
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> grows significantly. I wonder whether this is expected behavior. |
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I was just about to write something about this. I suffered from bad |
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performance for quite a while now (like mplayer stuttering during |
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emerges), started a thread in in the gentoo-performance list and got some |
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advice that made things a little better, but I suspect the effect came |
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from reduced memory usage only. Since yesterday the problems all seem to |
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be gone, but again it's not a real solution, as I plugged in another 2GB |
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of memory, so now I have 6G. |
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I used to restart kdm once per day in order to free memory. If I did not |
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do this, KDE4 became nearly unsusabe. |
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> The following statistics have been taken after 8 days of uptime during |
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> which the system was on standby most of the time during work days and |
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> at night. |
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> |
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> free -m |
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> total used free shared buffers cached |
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> Mem: 3754 3588 165 0 57 258 |
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> -/+ buffers/cache: 3271 482 |
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> Swap: 6142 978 5163 |
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> |
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> A desktop machine that has 4GB RAM and still needs to swap?! |
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After 1 day of uptime, my system needs even more, but I'm also running |
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some stuff. |
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wonko@weird ~ $ free -m |
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total used free shared buffers cached |
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Mem: 5721 5618 103 0 112 1108 |
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-/+ buffers/cache: 4397 1323 |
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Swap: 4094 50 4044 |
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> Excerpt from top: |
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> VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND |
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> 1094m 484m 10m S 0 12.9 96:43.01 firefox |
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> 932m 471m 15m S 0 12.6 5:10.20 akregator |
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> 384m 303m 2856 S 0 8.1 59:43.43 virtuoso-t |
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> 709m 282m 2936 S 0 7.5 0:40.51 nepomukservices |
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> 839m 146m 15m S 0 3.9 8:37.76 thunderbird-bin |
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> 191m 131m 532 S 0 3.5 12:30.73 dbus-daemon |
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> 902m 105m 5288 S 0 2.8 0:30.16 krunner |
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> 263m 105m 1724 S 0 2.8 2:31.18 squid |
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> 255m 61m 6672 S 7 1.6 305:04.24 X |
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> 1106m 55m 7756 S 0 1.5 4:22.73 amarok |
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> 534m 54m 10m S 0 1.5 2:33.94 kopete |
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> 559m 52m 6536 S 0 1.4 56:52.37 nepomukservices |
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> 718m 38m 12m S 4 1.0 143:36.62 plasma-desktop |
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> 295m 33m 2048 S 0 0.9 1:59.32 mysqld |
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> 360m 17m 1856 S 0 0.5 0:07.56 tomboy |
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> 445m 16m 3392 S 0 0.4 38:54.36 nepomukservices |
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> 365m 14m 6356 S 1 0.4 27:38.49 konsole |
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> 438m 11m 4928 S 0 0.3 0:20.12 kded4 |
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> 508m 11m 6364 S 0 0.3 0:45.79 kwin |
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Now this looks different here. I have X with 946M, plasma-desktop with |
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505M, that's 15 times the memory you need. Then comes java with 371M (for |
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TV-Browser - yes, 371MB just for showing the TV programme!), emerge wants |
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272M while emerging openoffice. Chromium also needs much memory, my 33 |
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tabs want 762M: |
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VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND |
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1722m 946m 22m R 24 16.5 217:29.77 X |
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1728m 504m 23m S 0 8.8 61:07.82 plasma-desktop |
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2018m 371m 6772 S 0 6.5 2:45.60 java |
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379m 272m 1884 S 0 4.8 4:39.50 emerge |
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2632m 127m 11m S 0 2.2 6:48.31 pica |
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694m 123m 21m S 0 2.2 11:28.50 kontact |
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1246m 117m 20m S 0 2.1 27:30.34 amarok |
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757m 101m 86m S 0 1.8 116:20.68 vmware-vmx |
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946m 94m 10m S 0 1.7 1:37.32 chrome |
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682m 91m 15m S 0 1.6 4:22.98 chrome |
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494m 79m 14m S 0 1.4 0:40.28 kmymoney |
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929m 61m 13m S 0 1.1 2:29.96 chrome |
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328m 56m 5084 S 0 1.0 1:46.09 kio_imap4 |
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73712 49m 616 S 0 0.9 0:10.79 screen |
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921m 48m 30m S 0 0.8 0:01.62 systemsettings |
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573m 46m 14m S 0 0.8 1:36.06 dolphin |
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> Okay, I'm used to Firefox taking much memory. I'm okay with that since |
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> it's the most heavily used application currently running. But why does |
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> Akregator need that much memory? It doesn't even have any tabs open at |
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> the moment and is just running minimized in the background. |
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Beats me. |
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> Virtuoso looks like an optional Soprano dependency which in turn is |
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> needed for Nepomuk. Are the default use flags for dev-libs/soprano |
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> suboptimal? What happens if I choose other flags for Soprano? |
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Don't know. But you can just turn off virtuoso in systemsettings-> desktop |
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search. |
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I just turned it on again, and - now I need 271M of swap, and again my |
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system becomes unresponsive due to the constant swapping that is going on. |
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With 6G! |
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Which is another problem I think. One question is how KDE4 can need such a |
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lot of memory, the other is how the system can become so unresponsive once |
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its starts swapping. I used to have larger swap with less RAM, and did not |
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have those performance problems. One year ago I usually had 2G tmpfs for |
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/var/tmp/portage, nowadays (with 4G) I cannot emerge things while working |
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with the system (like, watching videos with mplayer). It feels like as |
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soon as RAM is not enough and swapping occurs, the system swaps stuff that |
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it will need again immediately. |
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What stuff do I run? I have 8 activities/desktops, there are some |
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screenshots at [1] in case someone is interested. My default session has 4 |
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konsoles with a total of 8 tabs, 3 dolphins with 5 views, amarok, kontact, |
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kmymoney2. TV-Browser (java application which eats a lot of memory), some |
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admin tools like gkrellm or diagnostic plasmoids. And a lot of browser |
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tabs, around 30. Currently I'm using chromium, that seems to use less |
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memory than konqueror. The number of tabs increases with uptime. Is this |
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too much? Desktop effects are enabled. Today I started openoffice once, |
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played a little quake3. There is a windows VM running with vmplayer, but |
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that takes only 50MB. wine uses more, I'm using this today, but normally |
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not. |
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The system is an AMD Athlon 4850e (2 cores, 2500MHz) with 4GB of RAM. |
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Everything is on LVM, most partitions are LUKS-encrypted. /var/tmp/portage |
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is unencrypted, and at the moment swap is also not encrypted and on my 2nd |
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drive. The encryption does not be much of an overhead, when the system |
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stutters, top shows a large wa(it) value, and not much CPU usage. swappiness |
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is set to 10. |
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Any ideas? I might just get another 2G, and then the problems will be gone, |
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but I think this would be only a workaround. 6G should be enough already |
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even when using lots of applications, shouldn't it`? |
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BTW, I emerged and tried KDE 3.5 a week ago. Cool, things were fast |
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there. Probably because it needs less memory. But I don't want to go back. |
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Wonko |
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[1] http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-performance/msg_e4365aee884ee527dc8fb82d2c725ec4.xml |
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