Does a Cinnamon + KDE install use more ram than ea. alone?

[Lynwood]

I'd like to know from any of you who use both Cinnamon (or Mate or both) with KDE and use the System Load Indicator, or by other means know the installation's system load/resources usage, if the addition of the KDE metapackage makes the overall installation, regardless of which DE one's using, use more ram than running the normal version of either (Cinnamon/Mate or KDE).

[hal8000]

KDE uses slightly more RAM than Mate. I think I read somewhere that recommended RAM is 2G but it works quite
happily on my Centrino 1.73G with 1 G RAM. Swap file has not been used and as you can see
its using 859M of my 1G RAM.

[anc@slave ~]$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 997 859 138 0 25 345
-/+ buffers/cache: 487 510
Swap: 0 0 0

I just use two virtual desktops, as more tha this slows the laptop down too much.
You can speed up KDE and make it run faster by reducing virtual, desktops, disabling
graphical effects and turning off some KDE services like neopuk (file indexer) unless
you really want them.
A useful monito is htop:

sudo apt-get install htop

Which will display load CPU usage, running tasks and system load, in colour, all in
a terminal. KDE service manager is available from KDE system settings.

[Lynwood]

Not having been a KDE user, I find this very useful information, which I appreciate. But it didn't address my question: does having Cinnamon, Mate, AND KDE installed, though one uses only one at a time, use more ram than having only one of these three installed?

I ask because I have an installation of Ultimate Edition (of Ubuntu 10.04) 2.6 (way out of date now, but I'll upgrade it soon) on my tower/box computer. The box has 2 GB of DDR2 ram and an Intel dual-core 2.4 GHz processor, and UE has Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and one or more smaller DEs installed. I find that, using Gnome with T'bird, Nautilus, and Firefox with about 15 tabs uses 83% of my 2 GB of ram, and with NO program running in the foreground at all, it uses 44% of my 2 GB of ram! I'm wondering if this is simply because of additional software that gets loaded into ram just because it's all there, or is there something wrong?

I said I'd be upgrading UE, and I will. But I don't expect it to be my main OS; it's solely for experimenting with the various DEs and their apps. I intend to have Mint 15 with Cinnamon, Mate, and KDE installed and, separately, Ubuntu 13.04, possibly with other DEs installed. And I'm wondering if having those additional DEs will use more ram than having only one installed.

[bigj231]

I did not notice any increase in RAM usage when I installed KDE on my Mint 13 Cinnamon system. YMMV.
I also ran 4 different DE's on a less powerful system than yours a few years ago. It was fine until I started loading tons of applications.

[Lynwood]

You may have identified my problem. UE by its nature includes all the DEs' apps and so has a ton of software. And I, too, have installed additional programs, though I also have removed all games and gimp. I also keep the System Load Indicator (hardinfo) running with all six windows displayed.

Can anyone say why, with NO app running in the foreground except the System Load Indicator, ram has 44% of the 2 GB of DDR2 used? And, running Gnome with T'bird, Nautilus, and Firefox with about 15 tabs running (together with the System Load Indicator), uses 77-88% of the ram plus a fair amount of swap?

[OldManHook]

You may have identified my problem. UE by its nature includes all the DEs' apps and so has a ton of software. And I, too, have installed additional programs, though I also have removed all games and gimp. I also keep the System Load Indicator (hardinfo) running with all six windows displayed.

Can anyone say why, with NO app running in the foreground except the System Load Indicator, ram has 44% of the 2 GB of DDR2 used? And, running Gnome with T'bird, Nautilus, and Firefox with about 15 tabs running (together with the System Load Indicator), uses 77-88% of the ram plus a fair amount of swap?

All the Installed DE's will have some background processes running all the time...Using some CPU cycles and Ram...

[bigj231]

If you're running all the Gnome + KDE background services, I can easily see 1GB of RAM usage.
Also, you should see less than 90% RAM usage when you start using swap.

[Lynwood]

OldManHook, BigJ231, again, thanks. I believe you've provided the information, the explanation, I needed. That's just what I was trying to learn.

As for my seeing "less than 90% ram usage when I start using swap," yes, that's exactly what's happening. Obviously, if I want to continue using multiple DEs, I'll need to learn what background services to turn off in the DE I'm not using and back on when I want to use it, and the reverse for the other.

[hal8000]

Not having been a KDE user, I find this very useful information, which I appreciate. But it didn't address my question: does having Cinnamon, Mate, AND KDE installed, though one uses only one at a time, use more ram than having only one of these three installed?

The answer to your question is no.

Having Cinnamon, Mate and KDE installed do not use more memory but will use more Hard Disk space, because even when they are not used the files still occupy disk space.

Memory or RAM is used when an application or process is running. All operating systems will run background processes (as has already been stated). You will also find that Cinnamon, Mate and KDE all use different amounts of RAM, depending on what applications are running.
Hope that helps.

[Lynwood]

It helps, yes, but it still leaves me a little confused. I knew, of course, that the extra software--any software--will take additional disk space. It was ram usage that I'm concerned about because of what I'm experiencing now. Though I have Mint 14 installed, I'm using an old version of Ultimate Edition until I can consolidate all the information I've collected over the last few years and settings, using only Gnome (it really IS an old version*), and it, together with the three or four programs I mentioned, uses about 80% of my two gigs of ram. Even w/o *any* program up, it uses about 38% of the ram, i.e., about 800 MB. I'm sure that the later version will be more efficient, as the underlying Ubuntu is more efficient. But in my expected update of Mint 14 to 15, i expect to install all three DEs (Cinnamon, Mate, KDE). Both OldmanHook and bigj231 say that any additional DE, even though not being used, will have background services running that will use additional ram as well as processor cycles. But you say, no, there won't be any additional ram usage--or perhaps you meant that, even if it did, it'd be minimal, negligible. Could that be it? What do the others say?

> You will also find that Cinnamon, Mate and KDE all use different amounts of RAM, depending on what applications are running.
That doesn't surprise me. My (perhaps mis-)understanding is that KDE uses more ram than Gnome and, presumably, Cinnamon and Mate, apart from any program running. What do you all know about that?

*It's based on Ubuntu 10.04, which I've said before.

[hal8000]

[quote="Lynwood" But in my expected update of Mint 14 to 15, i expect to install all three DEs (Cinnamon, Mate, KDE). Both OldmanHook and bigj231 say that any additional DE, even though not being used, will have background services running that will use additional ram as well as processor cycles. But you say, no, there won't be any additional ram usage--or perhaps you meant that, even if it did, it'd be minimal, negligible. Could that be it? What do the others say?
*It's based on Ubuntu 10.04, which I've said before.[/quote]

No, I think you're interpreting there answer a little differently.
What they're saying is that if you run a Gnome program in a KDE environment then there may well be additional GTK daemons running, but only when the gnome program is started. ( Please feel free to correct me if I have intrepreted your responses wrong @OldmanHook & bigj231. )
You don't have to worry about your memory being used, because if you ran out of physical RAM, the linux kernel supplements memory by writing to the /swap partition. I've only ever seen my /swap file being used when I had 512M RAM, 1G memory and above and I don't think you'll see the /swap file being used at all.
Many operations run in memory before being wrote to disk, the kernel takes care of this automatically. In fact if your RAM was not used effectively then your system would use the /swap file and whole system slow down. The only time you should be concerned is if you see 100% memory usage and the /swap file in use, then its time to upgrade the memory.

You can run:
free -lm (to view memory usage)

top or htop (nicer) will also show memory usage and other stats as will gkrellm and a host of other system monitors.

[bigj231]

Hal8000 has it right, unless Gnome (Cinnamon) or KDE has any background services running at startup. AFAIK, there are not any installed by default. When you open a Gnome application in KDE it will have to load Gnome libraries that were not normally open. The opposite is also true.

[Lynwood]

This seems entirely senseable to me, so I'll consider my original question answered and ask that you indulge me further by helping me learn what's consuming so much of my ram? My processor isn't heavily used at all unless I'm running a heavy-processing program. The same goes for 'net usage, system load, and hdd usage.

[bigj231]

You can use the command line utility 'top' to view running processes. The KDE file indexing service has caused problems for me in the past. The KDE utility KSysGuard also works well. Just look in the process table.