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Shining Arcanine
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 Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2010 8:48 pm Post subject: The memory footprint of my laptop has dropped by 23% |
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When I ran KDE 4.3.5, the memory footprint of my laptop was 180MB when I would log in via KDM and open konsole to run "watch -n 0.5 free". After I upgraded to KDE 4.4.0, this increased to about 203MB. This alarmed me, so I put stuff I used to compile into the kernel into modules to reduce the system's memory footprint, which reduced it to 193MB. This remained largely uncharged for a while. I run my system with packages from the testing tree and frequently apply updates, so while I do not know what change caused this, today I logged into my system and noticed that memory usage had dropped by 23% to 148MB. I remember recently seeing updates recompile some things with -static-libs USE flags, but I did not notice a difference then, so I didn't think there had been any change.
This is a very pleasant surprise, especially since it brings KDE's memory footprint into territory that I believe it has not occupied since KDE 3.5.x. Does anyone know where the change in memory utilization originated? |
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Shining Arcanine
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| Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2010 10:32 pm Post subject: |
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It just dropped another 6% to 139MB at boot. I do not know what the latest updates are doing behind the scenes, but I like it.  |
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Shining Arcanine
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 1:06 am Post subject: |
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| I figured out why the memory footprint of my laptop dropped so significantly. Apparently, one of the updates switched opengl to the x11 driver, so Nvidia's GLX driver was not being loaded and compositing was off. :/ |
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Dont Panic
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 2:22 am Post subject: |
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| But how could you not notice right away that your wobbly windows weren't working? |
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Cyker
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 9:37 am Post subject: |
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Aww 
(Compositing needs 50MB RAM??!!  ) |
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Sadako
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 2:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Cyker wrote: | Aww
(Compositing needs 50MB RAM??!! ) |
Try nouveau. 
Seriously, if it bothers you, the open source graphics stack should have a lighter memory footprint than the binary blob, and nouveau being KMS-only should help too, on my ati hardware enabling KMS reduces memory consumption fairly significantly.
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Dont Panic
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 3:41 pm Post subject: |
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That brings up an interesting question.
How much of the 50 MB was due to nvidia-drivers, and how much was due to compositing?
My nvidia module only shows 10 MB used (based on the output of lsmod). |
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Shining Arcanine
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 6:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Dont Panic wrote: | | But how could you not notice right away that your wobbly windows weren't working? |
I do not have wobbly windows enabled in KDE. I tried it at one point, but the wobbles felt unnatural and I did not have time to calibrate it to have a more natural feel, so I just left it off. |
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Cyker
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 8:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Hopeless wrote: | | Cyker wrote: | Aww
(Compositing needs 50MB RAM??!! ) |
Try nouveau.
Seriously, if it bothers you, the open source graphics stack should have a lighter memory footprint than the binary blob, and nouveau being KMS-only should help too, on my ati hardware enabling KMS reduces memory consumption fairly significantly. |
I thought he was talking about KDE's footprint, not the X driver footprint! |
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Sadako
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 8:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Cyker wrote: | | I thought he was talking about KDE's footprint, not the X driver footprint! |
Yeah, so did he at first, but you were both wrong.
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Dont Panic
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 10:32 pm Post subject: |
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This thread piqued my curiosity to see how much swapping between nv and nvidia would affect a non-compositing wm.
I use simple, good-old-fashioned, non-compositing IceWM as my primary window manager.
I'm using x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-190.53-r1 with a nVidia GeForce 7600 GS video card.
I rebooted clean once to nvidia-drivers, then reconfigured to use the nv drivers (making sure the nvidia module was now blacklisted), and rebooted again.
Both had 24 bit color depth at 1024x768 resolution.
In my simpler non-compositing test, the nvidia-drivers boot required 14,728 kbyte more memory than the nv drivers boot. |
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Shining Arcanine
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| Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2010 12:52 am Post subject: |
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| It could be that this is a KDE thing. Perhaps someone should file a bug report at KDE's bugzilla. Presently, I do not have an account to file the report myself and I also lack the time to check if the report would be a duplicate before posting it. :/ |
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