Paul Hartman writes: > On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Alex Schuster <wo...@wonkology.org> wrote:
> I can't remember the last time my swap was used at all. I have 12G of > RAM, but in my prior system with 8G it was the same. Only in a rare > case when some program had run-away memory usage/memory leak did I > ever get to swap usage... I'm using vanilla kernel 2.6.39 with no > patches, no BFS. And I use proprietary nvidia-drivers. I normally > don't have so many programs running at once, but it happens sometimes. Maybe I should have bought 4G instead of 2G, so I'd have 10G, not 8G. I'm not sure if this is recommended these days, to have one memory bank with 4G and 3 others with 2G each. > Since 2.6.38 and enabling automatic process grouping, I don't use nice > or ionice at all anymore. I do parallel emerge with -j along with make > -j12 and never notice any slowdown or lag in UI at all. This is okay now, since I started using the pf-sources. But I have no explanation, I have been using the BFS scheduler already before with ck-sources. > With KDE4 logged in, and no GUI apps running (other than knutmon and > wicd), my RAM usage is slightly less than 900M (not counting > filesystem caches). I don't want to log out now, but I have logs of experiments I did half a year ago. After a reboot, at the KDM login screen, the +/- buffers/cache line of free -m output showed 244M used. After logging into KDE4, it's 2954M, but I have maby apps (Konsoles, Kontact, Amarok, TV-Browser, Dolphin, Chromium) being started automatically. >> BTW, does anyone else's kwin use 750M? That's pretty high, I think it used >> to be more like 300M. > > My kwin (4.6.3-r1) has currently 507M VIRT, 54M RES, 37M SHR according to top. It's growing: 1405m VIRT, 851m RES, 6m SHR. Strange, I did not actually use the desktop after I wrote the mail you replied to, currently I'm logged in from remote. And it grows while I compose this mail, about 1M every 2 minutes. This is not normal, though. I use a little script to create a log file with some memory information, and when I grep these 50 files for the kwin process, I see memory usage between 410M and 520M mostly. Three were higher, up to 1.4G, but these were plasma bugs (suddenly haveing eight activities instead of one; and a problem of the file watcher plasmoid with very large log files). I also found one log with kwin using only 154M, but that was when I had KDE 3.5 running :) > My worst memory offenders, by resident memory: > clamd 124M > denyhosts 114M > X 75M > plasma-desktop 56M kwin 851 kontact 385 java 373 (TV-Browser, this is also growing) X 124 okular 115 chrome 110 chrome 106 mysqld 93 ... BTW, with each Chromium tab being a single process, I wonder which tab uses 100M of RAM. > My PC doesn't swap, but in my Nokia N900, it runs Linux and X, heavy > use of gtk and Qt4 libs, it has 256M of RAM and 768M of swap on eMMC > (transfer rate about 20MB/sec). It swaps like crazy. :) Usually there > is more swap in use than RAM, actually. > > When I move the swap to a slow SD card instead (2MB/sec transfer > rate), even in that slow device, swapoff on the eMMC swap partition > with ~500M in-use takes about 2 or 3 minutes at most with the data > being swapped slowly into the SD card. > > So I think in your case it should be much faster than that! Or not, with the large access times of hard drive. I don't know how large the chunks of memory stored in swap are, I thought some megabytes at least. Does anyone have an idea? I'd ask Volker, but I'm worried about his gall bladder. >From another mail: > Or better yet, figure out why his system is swapping at all which is > what he was going for I think. With 8 GB I think he should be able to > disable swap entirely anyway. :) That's what I think, too. As I wrote, I always used to have many applications open, and in the past this was no problem. If anyone is interested, there are some screenshots of my desktop here: http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/ The 2010-11-28 shows the six desktops I have now, shortly after login. It's made half a year ago, but my desktop still looks quite similar. right now I have some extra stuff running, but not very much. And looking at the 3x3 desktops in one image (desktop3x3.png) from 2004, I see I was using 856M of RAM and 748M of swap then. With a Windows VM, a Mozilla window, some 15 or more Galeon tabs, and some more stuff. Without big performance problems. It might have taken a little while before the Windows VM became fully responsive, but I did not have the constant swapping I experience now. Wonko
