System Monitor uses too much system resources for an app that should be able to diagnose system resources usage.
My main use case for opening System Monitor is to identify which process is a resource hogger, when my system is running low on memory. It is not acceptable that now System Monitor itself uses significant amount of memory, often preventing me to open it at all without risking kernel to kill other process first (e.g. Firefox, Code). Now, I need to use htop to do so.
The following screenshot is also quite illustrative…
Ksysguard in comparison was much leaner on resources and in general also felt much more responsive.
I sincerely do not understand why one gave up on writing efficient native GUIs and uses dependencies on fancy libraries like Kirigami, which still feel very sluggish and slow. As if there was nothing between cli and web.
Something is definitely weird if you’re seeing 4% cpu use and nearly 200MiB of memory use. My own instance is hovering around 0.3 - 0.5% cpu use and less than 150MiB of memory use. Looking at the details section there are only two processes running under systemmonitor on my own instance. plasma-systemmonitor and ksgrd_network_helper
Highlight System Monitor, click the ellipsis button beside Configure Columns and select Show Details Sidebar. At the bottom under processes it will list what is currently running under system monitoring.
I also noticed that Dolphin uses noticeably more resources than in your case, so I thought it could be linked to 4K monitor with fractional scaling, but even changing to internal 1080p display with no scaling does not change this.
On a side note, Firefox processes are wrongly grouped as background processes.
Mine uses 130-230 mb of ram depending on if I have added sensors to the overview, removed them etc. It uses anywhere from ~1.3% to ~5-7% but 2-3% seems the average at the moment.
But I have a 2017 i5-7500T with 4 cores, and is the 35 watt version.
On my laptop with s 2021(?) i5-1135G7 with 8 cores, the monitor barely ever seems to sip the cpu. Haven’t seen it above 0.5%, and often at 0.1%, with almost identical ram usage.
So I will guess the CPU has something to do with it.
This statement is blatantly false. Nothing makes Kirigami worse or slow for GUI. In some cases it is even faster than QtWidgets as it uses modern subsytems and properly utilises resources like the GPU. Stop blaming the UI library when the problem is definitely somewhere else.
Regardless of the issue. KSysGuard is not coming back anytime soon. The whole reason it was dropped is that no one wants to maintain it anymore. Feel free to try it yourself if you like. Instead, I would recommend helping us figure out why plasma system monitor is consuming so much resources when it shouldn’t.
I reset my System Monitor and all pages back to stock - I had added an extra page, as well as tweaked the overview on my PC.
The PC:
Operating System: KDE neon User Edition
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.19.0
Qt Version: 6.9.2
Kernel Version: 6.14.0-33-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-7500T CPU @ 2.70GHz
Graphics Processor: Intel® HD Graphics 630
Now the laptop, completely stock monitor:
Same exact OS specs, a mostly stock and recent install.
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
Graphics Processor: Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
These are approximate middle grounds, the most common percentages after a minute or so of observation.
Interesting that the ram usage is essentially identical, and the CPU usage is very much different. Would the beefier graphics on the laptop vs the PC be a factor?
