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KDE memory usage

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CD-RW

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1

Tuesday, August 7th 2007, 3:41pm

KDE memory usage

Hi all. I have a problem with the amount of memory that is used by KDE and applications.

I have a total of 2.5GB DDR-200 memory installed.

Using qps tells me that 1GB of memory is used for caching. Is there any way I can tell KDE to clear this cached memory, and make it available to programs again please?

The only way I know so far is to shut down KDE and restart it again. This is a pain, because I have to set up my desktop environment again.

TIA

kriko

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Location: Slovenia

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 2:10pm

Thats kinda impossible. I have 1.5 GB memory and active usage is about 315 MB when using KDE + amarok, opera, mplayer, some konqueror windows open and ktorrent.
Use "free" to examine your memory usage:
kriko@linux:~> free -m

Source code

 
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                 total        used         free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1519       1485         34          0         19          1147
-/+ buffers/cache:        319         1200
Swap:         1027          0           1027


As you see I have 34 MB free, 319MB is actively used.

CD-RW

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 3:09pm

# free -m

Source code

 
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             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2529       2452         77          0        251        777
-/+ buffers/cache:       1423       1106
Swap:         1027          0       1027

I have 1GB of swap partition.

qps http://qps.kldp.net/ reports:

Source code

 
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Memory:   Total: 2GB    Used: 1GB    Cached: 780Mb   Buffer: 251Mb
Swap:     Total: 1GB    Free: 1GB    Used: 184Kb

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "CD-RW" (Aug 9th 2007, 3:16pm)

kriko

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 3:13pm

Are you running some heavy memory apps? What distro do you have? Are you experiencing lags in desktop, heavy memory swapping?

CD-RW

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 3:27pm

I'm running Fedora Core 6. I have 15 desktops all with virtual window sizes about 2.5 times the height of my 14" monitor.

I have alot of mc editor windows open as well as Konqueror and Firefox browsers running. I notice that FireFox likes to cache alot of stuff. Killing that in qps sometime frees FF's cached memory.

Here are some screen shots of my machines memory usage, taken with qps and KSnapShot:

Notice how much Firefox is using: 462MB. Killing that helps reduce memory usage.
CD-RW has attached the following images:
  • mem1.png
  • mem2.png
  • mem3.png

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "CD-RW" (Aug 9th 2007, 3:30pm)

kriko

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 3:31pm

Can you measure memory usage with empty session? If you are running such many applications and probably tabs in ff it might explain this.

CD-RW

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 3:44pm

I could do when I have to reboot the machine. I'd rather not do it now thankyou kriko.

CD-RW

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 3:52pm

I have just terminated process 4996 Firefox 462MB, and process 2726 180MB Konqueror and 2 other Konqueror windows. Here is the output again from free:

Source code

 
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# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2529       1594        935          0        247        768
-/+ buffers/cache:        578       1950
Swap:         1027          0       1027


Notice how the amount of used memory has gone down, and the free memory has increased. The amount of memory cached has not changed much at all though.
Is this normal? It's the cached memory I want to free up, as well as the application memory.

kriko

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Thursday, August 9th 2007, 4:28pm

Much better. Do you use 64 or 32 bit os? I had bigger memory usage under 64-bit.

CD-RW

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Friday, August 17th 2007, 1:49pm

Fedora Core 6 32bit AMD Duron 1600 processor.

CD-RW

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Friday, August 17th 2007, 2:09pm

I have shut down all my windows apart from 2 root shells for qps and free. The other window is Konqueror browser, so I can access this forum thread.

Here is the output from free -m after rebooting the machine from scratch, then starting KDE up again:

Source code

 
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             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2534        266       2268          0         22        138
-/+ buffers/cache:        105       2429
Swap:         1027          0       1027


I include attachments of running processes shown with qps.
CD-RW has attached the following images:
  • new-mem1.png
  • new-mem2.png

kriko

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Location: Slovenia

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12

Friday, August 17th 2007, 4:04pm

Well, thats allright. You use a lot of apps, that might cause it. Memory usage can also grow if some of used applications cause memory leak. Ensure you have latest KDE environment (3.5.7), though I never had memory leaks in kde itself, the only problem was superkaramba, causing memory leak by an applet (fixed now).