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.
