I’m somewhat new to the world of Linux (using Kubuntu on a Dell Latitude 7290), but I’ve seen people online saying that their plasmashell uses around 300mb on idle. I set animations to instant, and using the breeze dark theme (which I’ve heard is the fastest), I’m idling at 1.3GB, which isn’t crazy much, but it is a lot more than 300mb. Can anyone help me with this?
Mostly just don’t pay too much attention to folks boasting about super low idle RAM statistics unless you have a complete and exhaustive set of detailed system information in order to try to figure out how that is achieved…
There are many variables - nVidia is a big one, simply using the desktop is another.
Meanwhile you could try to get a fresher ‘idle’ state by executing:
kquitapp5 plasmashell && plasmashell
People who claim idle on 300mb isn’t running anything in the background. Also the system makes the most of the memory it has available.
More than that, it’s likely only possible on a freshly booted desktop - as soon as you do anything, it’s going to be lost to cache and other stuff.
It also varies by distribution, what services are enabled, whether you’re including shared libraries in that (that would double it)…
A full featured distributiuon like Kubuntu or Fedora with Baloo and other services is likely to hit 600 to 800 MB on boot, even more… I’ve got 408 MiB showing now for ‘Background Services’, Dropbox is another 54 MiB, Bitwarden, CopyQ, Matray, Conky…
The amount of RAM that is used by processes depends on the available RAM in your computer.
For example, a computer with only 4 GB of RAM should, on idle and after boot, use only a few hundred MB, a computer with 32 GB should use a few GB.
ram usage in linux is really not worth paying much attention to unless you are experiencing out of memory conditions.
linux and plasma are both really good at managing memory and giving it up when a user demands more.
the crippling of your system you would have to do in order to achieve that benchmark is not worth the effort nor the inconvenience of having to spin up processes from scratch that should already be running in the background
Well, there is value in being wary of RAM usage if it means detecting memory leaks. Depending on OP’s case plasmashell may indeed be using too much RAM. That’s for devs (and valgrind etc) to determine though.
Thing is I’ve recently been hitting Memory Shortages quite often (and I get a notification saying “Linux terminated X process to avoid a memory shortage”) and I really don’t have much open. Usually it’s like, Firefox, Discord, Beeper (a messaging app), sometimes Youtube Music and that‘s it. Neither of those apps should eat that much RAM, right ?? I really doubt just that could cause a shortage if I have 8GB of normal RAM and 9GB of swap. There’s no way.
Assuming they aren’t connected, then not really - but once you connect to some website with Firefox, you’re downloading apps into the browser - so especially with Firefox there’s no limit. I don’t use Discord or Beeper so I can’t answer for them.
Some folks keep tabs open in Firefox - Youtube can be massive, as can many Google services, if used for a while… so you’re not ‘idle’ if you have those apps loaded.
Idle means a vanilla desktop boot with no autostart services, servers or whatever.
8GiB of RAM is absolutely quite limiting, however, so I’d suggest 1. start up a vanilla desktop and don’t do much for a while, then start a Firefox session - load up what you usually load up and see how that goes… then fire up Discord and see how that goes…
However, your initial figure 1.3 GiB is starting to sound very reasonable.
that’s actually quite a lot and depending on what content is being loaded into each of those, it can add up pretty quickly.
8GB is quite limited and for a machine like that i would not even recommend running the plamsa desktop at all… you would be better off with a distro like lubuntu running a very light weight DE which will leave more on the table for all these apps you want to have open.
This is the results of “smem | grep plasmashell” when run on my Fedora 43 laptop with KDE 6.6.1:
smem | grep plasmashell
2101 mos /usr/bin/plasmashell --no-r 0 281428 305669 423500
This is with just the KDE desktop, one konsole and Firefox with 4 tabs.
The numeric columns are “swap USS PSS RSS” in that order.
The kernel I was running was: 7.0.0-0.rc2.21.fc45.x86_64