RE: high memory usage in KDE?
On 08-Aug-2002 nick phillips wrote:
> hello list,
>
> i'm running debian 3.0 and KDE 2.2 on a PII 366 toshiba laptop with 128 mb
> ram. i'm mainly concerned with running audio applications in linux, so
> memory usage is pretty important to me in dealing with large samples being
> loaded into memory and so on. i'm a little concerned about KDE's memory
> usage at the moment. when i boot into KDE, with no applications running, and
> issue the 'top' command, it shows about 95MB used, with 35 MB available.
> this strikes me as very high - i'm a mac person, and my powerbook boots up
> Mac OS 9 using only 35 mb ram, so i'm surprised KDE takes so much memory.
> when i open up a few applications, pretty quickly KDE starts drawing on swap
> space, which seems to cause some slowdowns and glitches in some audio
> programs.
>
> so, my question is: is this an ordinary amount of memory for KDE to use? are
> there any ways to decrease memory usage so i can minimize using swap space?
> or should i think about switching to GNOME or another window manager? i like
> KDE a lot - i would just like it to use less memory!
>
depending on who you read GNOME is worse, slightly better or about the same.
Note "window manager" is exactly that -- the thing which draws borders around
windows and helps you interact with them. You can run pretty much any wm you
want and still use KDE/GNOME apps. Some wms interoperate better though.
As an experiment load up just a window manager and run the KDE app(s) you are
most interested in. I use blackbox on my laptop and run one or two kde apps,
mostly konqueror.
> one last thing - one process in particular seems to take the most memory,
> which is kdeinit. using 'top', i see about ten instances of kdeinit, each
> using about 5-8% memory. i assume this is part of the kde desktop, but
> should there be so many instances of it?
>
sorry, someone more familiar with running the full KDE suite will have to
comment on this. What you might be seeing is a threaded application which ps
shows as multiple instances of the same app.
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