plasma-desktop consumes more and more ram as more actions on the desktop are performed, easily achieving over 200 MB in a relatively short period of time. Starting new activities, switching activities, adding and removing widgets, opening and closing programs and windows, and switching desktops all cause the amount of memory plasma-desktop consumes to increase. When closing windows, widgets, etc., memory is not freed. pasma-desktop continues taking up ram. I am using the default desktop effects settings with this openSUSE install, with the “radeon” kernel driver. I also have noticed Xorg use high amounts of memory and CPU time on occasion, and don’t know if these two things are related. Is this normal behavior?
I forgot to mention that this is on openSUSE 13.1 x64. Can someone please confirm if this is happening on their machine? KDE 4 has had many past bug reports about memory leaks, including with plasma-desktop, one of which involved pixmaps. They were marked as closed, but obviously there is a problem, so I need to know if someone else can reproduce these issues.
I guess the thing to note is that KDE is a Desktop which generally tries to do everything possible under the surface to make the User Experience as smooth as possible. This consumes considerable RAM.
If you’re working in a memory-constrained environment, you might consider a Desktop without the fancy baubles that try to make everything available as quickly as possible when you want it. openSUSE supports many Desktops which provide varying functionalities and consume less resources than KDE.
That said, nowadays it’s a common feature of all OS to not return resources immediately for example when an application closes but retain at least remnants in memory to accelerate re-launch if the User returns to the app.
That is why included in my Wiki article about how to use the “free” tool I also included the command to clear the memory buffers and cache if you really do intend to change from one heavy taskload to another and don’t intend to re-launch old apps.
http://en.opensuse.org/User:Tsu2/free_tool
HTH,
TSU
It never returns the resources, and below is a screen shot of what I was able to get the system to do after switching activities, creating new activities, changing themes, and adding and removing widgets. This was a rare thing that I haven’t been able to get the system to do yet (a freak situation), but it proves my point. What I mean here, is that I haven’t been able to get the system to break this bad until now. The system became so unstable that I was barely able to take a screen shot and was forced to press the reset button on the PC. It took 100% of my memory and utilized 100% of my swap file. The screen shot I wanted to take would have shown that 100% of the CPU was being utilized by various components of KDE, but by that time the system was completely unresponsive. I encourage others to do what I did, to see if they can reproduce this problem. I can get plasma-desktop to consume over 400MB of ram in a matter of minutes, and that ram is never freed.
Nobody else wants to reproduce this problem? If I’m the only one reporting this serious bug (and no, it’s not related to my system or something special I’m doing), KDE isn’t going to get fixed. This is not acceptable for mainstream desktop use. KDE obviously has horrendous memory leaks, and this doesn’t exist in Windows. Why is nobody fixing this? They fix one thing, then another thing is broken. I’m disappointed at the development of KDE.
In my experience its not really a bug what you seem to have is more of an annoyance. This was put in by the KDE devs so one could access anything at anytime it’s called the Semantic Desktop. Now you can use your PC without it I have for quite a while you won’t really miss it. That said try this:
- System Settings(Configure Desktop)>Desktop Search Uncheck the Enable Nepomuk Semantic Desk click Apply
- then go to your ~/ **.kde4/share/config/nepomukserverrc **and set “Start Nepomuk” to false.
- Open ~/.kde4/share/config/kdedrc and set “autoload” to false for nepomuksearchmodule:
[Module-nepomuksearchmodule]
autoload=false
4.Disable Akonadi
Open ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc and set “StartServer” to false.
QMYSQL] StartServer=false
Please note that the ~/.config is not in The ,kde4 folder but is a hidden file in your home folder.
It’s the activities feature that ruined it for me. I check SLED11 plasma and it doesn’t have this problem.
Personally, I just setup a cron weekly on 13.1 to replace /usr/share/autostart with a custom set of launchers.
Then you can choose whatever desktop/panel/wm you want and still keep some useful KDE services running in the background.
As I suggested before,
Just place the command I provided to clear memory buffers and cache in a script on your desktop. As I described in my wiki, anytime I intend to make a massive change in tasks (eg closing down many work VMs and then doing multimedia personal stuff), I just hit the script. In a couple seconds, I’m ready to open more heavy apps with practically all resources available.
And, this works no matter what Desktop you’re running, it operates at the lower levels of the OS memory management. If you change your mind and intend to open previously used apps again, the only diff is that they have to be loaded completely from disk again and won’t be memory resident.
But, before you do that you should use the “free” tool in the way I wrote. The Task Manager you reference is good for many things but it doesn’t give you an accurate picture of overall memory usage.
TSU
Windows Explorer only takes up a very small amount of ram, and it doesn’t grow over time. KDE consumes more and more ram the longer the computer is on, and in my case, Xorg grows along with plasma-desktop and kded4, which as you can see in the screenshot below, also grows to a large size. A novice desktop user should not have to run a command to clear memory; it should never grow that large in the first place. So, whether if it’s a leak, a design flaw, or how it’s designed, it’s bad no matter which one.
Another thing that you’ll notice with KDE 4.x is that every instance of Dolphin takes up about 15,000-20,000~ K, which also is a bad design. There’s a way to make the file system share the memory rather than open up a new instance for every folder that’s open. KDE has some real bright spots that I love, with features and methods of doing things that are superb to Windows, but I am not going to take a biased view like some people and just bury my head in the sand and act like there’s no problem. That’s just stupid and doesn’t do anything for progress.
Thank you for this; I will try it and report back. I am more concerned about new users – Linux is known to be lightweight and consume less ram than Windows; not in the case of KDE 4.x on openSUSE 13.1!
After one day of normal desktop use, plasma-desktop was taking over half a gig of ram. I’m going to disagree that this is a mere annoyance, or this is “as designed”:
How many instance of dolphin you have running?
I’m not going to comment on your problem since I haven’t really monitored resource usage that much lately myself. But I don’t think Linux, or rather Linux based OS’s, are known to be lightweight. They can be of course.
KDE which is one of the most common desktops has pretty much been a resource hog since forever and that’s one of the downsides of it. I think it as a powerful desktop for modern computers, not a lighter Windows alternative. Gnome, probably lighter than KDE but also mainly for modern computers.
I know they’re trying to do something different with plasma-netbook but I’m not really convinced with that yet.
On 02/14/2014 02:36 AM, pirithous pecked at the keyboard and wrote:
> Sagemta;2623355 Wrote:
>> In my experience its not really a bug what you seem to have is more of
>> an annoyance. This was put in by the KDE devs so one could access
>> anything at anytime it’s called the Semantic Desktop. Now you can use
>> your PC without it I have for quite a while you won’t really miss it.
>> That said try this:
>>
>> 1. System Settings(Configure Desktop)>Desktop Search Uncheck the Enable
>> Nepomuk Semantic Desk click Apply
>> 2. then go to your ~/ *.kde4/share/config/nepomukserverrc *and set
>> “Start Nepomuk” to false.
>> 3. Open ~/.kde4/share/config/kdedrc and set “autoload”to false
>> for nepomuksearchmodule:
>> [Module-nepomuksearchmodule]
>> autoload=false
>>
>> 4.Disable Akonadi
>> Open ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc and set “StartServer” to
>> false.
>> QMYSQL] StartServer=false
>>
>> Please note that the ~/.config is not in The ,kde4 folder but is a
>> hidden file in your home folder.
> Thank you for this; I will try it and report back. I am more concerned
> about new users – Linux is known to be lightweight and consume less ram
> than Windows; not in the case of KDE 4.x on openSUSE 13.1!
>
>
Linux is known to be more robust because it caches many more processes.
This is not a bug but a design choice. I have 8G of ram and most of it
is used in cache.
Ken
Can you provide documentation about this?
On 02/18/2014 10:26 AM, pirithous pecked at the keyboard and wrote:
> kensch;2625603 Wrote:
>> Linux is known to be more robust because it caches many more processes.
>> This is not a bug but a design choice. I have 8G of ram and most of it
>> is used in cache.
>>
>> Ken
> Can you provide documentation? I came across something about this
> before, but it sounded like something different than what I’m
> experiencing; I’ll see if I can find it again.
>
>
Go to a terminal and type in free . it will show you how much ram is
being used and how much is taken by cache.
Ken
Another general comment. about GUI’s.
Each GUI app will have one or more virtual screen or drawing area assigned to it. X is the program that keeps track of these drawing areas And each drawing area takes up memory. So If you have a ton of programs open X is going to take up memory for each program. In all your pictures you show a huge number of programs, mostly dolphin. The above pic shows 15+ open dolphin instances. Another time FF which appears to have a huge number of tabs open where each tab takes up yet another drawing area. It is not surprising to see X taking up a large amount of memory.
The FF high ram consumption shown in the screen shots was not from multiple tabs open, but was due to memory leaks in version 26.0.1 that have since been partially fixed. X and plasma-desktop should release memory when widgets and applications are closed, which they do not. Multiple instances of dolphin open is not a regular thing for me, and has nothing to do with these leaks. The command: “free -m” does show most of my ram used, but this is not representative whatsoever of the ram consumption shown in KSysGuard. The problem I’m describing is not because of disk caching. The command to clear memory buffers and cache does not change the growing ram consumption shown in KSysGuard. I turned off Semantic Desktop and that achieved nothing. Bug reports exist from other users on these issues; I guess I’ll just live with it till there’s a fix. I do a lot of graphical stuff on my PC and use the “radeon” kernel driver, so my usage patterns and hardware is different from many others’.
If you like looking into this sort of thing,
I’d recommend you compare your observations with booting into an extremely minimal Desktop, ie IceWM. It’s an option on boot (if you disable auto login). And it looks like openSUSE has promoted IceWM from an emergency graphical Desktop to a standard Install option (minimal Desktop).
A base install will provide you with little more than the following:
A Desktop environment, a little more than only a Window Manager
Xterm
A file manager
Chromium
YAST
TSU