Is this ram usage normal?

[fullwonder]

xfce panel and applets are taking a lot of my ram and this is just after restarting my pc

[JerryF]

From what I see, Xfce panel isn't taking up that much RAM. How many applets do you have?

[Flemur]

xfce panel and applets are taking a lot of my ram and this is just after restarting my pc

They don't look out of control...Try

Code: Select all

free -m

in a terminal after you boot.

W/fluxbox I have about 95MB "used", with Xfce, IIRC, it was 250MB or so, right after booting.
You might wait until "mintUpdate" has finished (I don't run it at boot, but it runs by default).

[trytip]

@Flemur
how do you have 250MB with XFCE pretty much blocked every startup and service i can without taking removing vital organs and my xfce (installed as mint19 cinnamon converted to xfce) still uses around 510MB at startup. are you using nvidia drivers or any proprietary drivers?
i managed to get cinnamon down to around 610MB but xfce is much snappier. so far i don't see any conflicts between cinnamon/xfce i only keep cinnamon so i can compare with users issues. maybe it's my system

@fullwonder
you'll need to block some non-essentials in settings/session and startup/application autostart like the mint software may have leaks in it

ps:DON"T use the gnome system monitor to check RAM it's not accurate in xfce use the xfce4-taskmanager and to see values in kilobytes in taskmanager settings check show memory usage in bytes

[Flemur]

@Flemur
how do you have 250MB with XFCE pretty much blocked every startup and service i can without taking removing vital organs and my xfce (installed as mint19 cinnamon converted to xfce) still uses around 510MB at startup. are you using nvidia drivers or any proprietary drivers?

I just now logged-out of fluxbox, back into Xfce, and "free -m" said 192 used...then I stopped "mintupdate" (or some such), and it was down to 169MB. But my Xfce is sort-of broken (menu is missing a bunch of stuff), which I don't care about because I very rarely use it...but it was 256MB or so - definitely less than 300MB - with everything working properly.

nvidia drivers add about 50MB used and don't make any noticeable difference (full-screen videos, but no fancy gaming), so I don't use them.

system.jpg

[gm10]

@Flemur
how do you have 250MB with XFCE pretty much blocked every startup and service i can without taking removing vital organs and my xfce (installed as mint19 cinnamon converted to xfce) still uses around 510MB at startup.

A clean, unmodified install of Mint 19 Xfce 64-bit comes up with about 300 MB used (just tried in a VM). I don't have the 18.3 version around that he used but I see nothing wrong with his number. Once you remove unnecessary stuff from 19 you can probably drop it into the same region.

If memory is an issue, the 32-bit version certainly would use less of it, too (might miss out on some apps then though).

[fullwonder]

thanks for replying

these are the applets and programs/daemons that start with booting (in the attachments)

to be honest I don't know much ram xfce panel and applets are supposed to take but I switched from kde based distro and it was taking only about 450+ mb of ram

I installed I3 and compiled two packages for it yesterday which required me to install a lot of dependencies that I kept the names of most of them:

libcairo-script-interpreter2 libcairo2-dev libexpat1-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libglib2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev-bin libice-dev libpcre16-3 libpcre3-dev
libpcre32-3 libpcrecpp0v5 libpixman-1-dev libpng-dev libpthread-stubs0-dev libsm-dev libx11-dev libxau-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-ewmh2 libxcb-icccm4-dev
libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shm0-dev libxcb-util-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb1-dev libxdmcp-dev libxext-dev libxrender-dev
python-xcbgen python3-distutils python3-lib2to3 x11proto-core-dev x11proto-dev x11proto-xext-dev xcb-proto xorg-sgml-doctools xtrans-dev zlib1g-dev
gir1.2-harfbuzz-0.0 icu-devtools libatk-bridge2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libatspi2.0-dev libdbus-1-dev libdrm-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libepoxy-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev
libglvnd-core-dev libglvnd-dev libgraphite2-dev libgtk-3-dev libharfbuzz-dev libharfbuzz-gobject0 libicu-dev libicu-le-hb-dev libicu-le-hb0 libiculx60 libopengl0
libpango1.0-dev libwayland-bin libwayland-dev libx11-xcb-dev libxcb-dri2-0-dev libxcb-dri3-dev libxcb-glx0-dev libxcb-present-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-sync-dev
libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxdamage-dev libxfixes-dev libxft-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxrandr-dev
libxshmfence-dev libxtst-dev libxxf86vm-dev wayland-protocols x11proto-composite-dev x11proto-damage-dev x11proto-dri2-dev x11proto-fixes-dev x11proto-gl-dev
x11proto-input-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-record-dev x11proto-xf86vidmode-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev

[fullwonder]

well, after some googling I found some people advising to change the theme because they had ram leaks caused by the panel applets so I changed the theme but that didn't help though. But while I was in appearance I clicked on icons and I read the warning note next to the icons pack I'm using which I avoided earlier

"sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/iconpackname" that saved me a good amount of ram

Now I wonder is there a way to make mint-update use less ram or is there more lightweight option that runs at startup? What does "Thunar --daemon" do?

[gm10]

Now I wonder is there a way to make mint-update use less ram or is there more lightweight option that runs at startup?

Depends what you want it to do? If you want that icon available in the notification area at all times then you'll have to live with it. If you just want to check for updates at boot you could disable the mintUpdate autostart and instead use something like the script I posted for Pjotr the other day: viewtopic.php?p=1499417#p1499417

[trytip]

well i got it down to 434MB after 5 minute on idle after startup, the screenshot took it higher but i do also have redshift, 3 conkys, system load monitor, network monitor, weather and pulseaudio plugin. i also use compton and tumblerd (but i guess that comes standard with mint xfce i converted cinnamon into xfce) i guess i'm happy right now it's using 891MB with chrome and 3 tabs open.

@gm10
going 32 bit is not something i'd look into. even though my old 2007 desktop with 5drives and nvidia9800 takes a lot of power and bios only allowing me to use 3.25GB RAM out of 4GB, i still get quite good quality in games and online video. i'm sure i can chisel some more services (forgot i had privoxy and tor starting up which for some reason that's enabled by default if you install them in ubuntu distros). cinnamon would eat the RAM and not give it back after closing apps and having the system load monitor i hear is a memory leak , but have gotten used to conkys and panel monitors enabled and can't work without them.

[gm10]

I'm not actually using Mint Xfce so other than the default number from a VM I can't compare. I have an MX Linux on one device (debian distro with Xfce DE) but that's more light-weight than Mint Xfce.

My main DE on Mint is MATE and I have that fairly slimmed down with every unnecessary background process ripped out (Mint is slightly bloated by default), but I also run a few panel applets. A badly written applet can be a real performance killer, but the few I use are fine.

[MtnDewManiac]

Could it have something to do with:

(installed as mint19 cinnamon converted to xfce)

By the way, cool avatar; I never noticed it before. I didn't know we were able to use animated ones here. I also didn't know I was still capable of spewing water from my nose . That'll teach me to drink water whilst browsing threads early in the morning (good thing I'm out of coffee, lol).

Regards,
MDM

[benali72]

I support a bunch of Mint/Xfce boxes, most on 19.1, a few still on 17.x.

Upon startup, memory use is about 300-500 meg according to System Monitor. It depends on what programs you automatically start, of course. You can minimize this by turning off unused programs in START -> SETTINGS -> SESSION and STARTUP (the APPLICATION AUTOSTART tab).

During typical use, memory use runs up to a maximum of about 2 gig (which is never exceeded for most users, meaning I run Mint/xfce on old 2 gig dual core boxes with great success).

Hope this helps. Cheers.

[LinWinux]

well, after some googling I found some people advising to change the theme because they had ram leaks caused by the panel applets so I changed the theme but that didn't help though. But while I was in appearance I clicked on icons and I read the warning note next to the icons pack I'm using which I avoided earlier

"sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/iconpackname" that saved me a good amount of ram

Now I wonder is there a way to make mint-update use less ram or is there more lightweight option that runs at startup? What does "Thunar --daemon" do?

I experienced some massive ram leaks with Conky and with Vivaldi Browser. The ram leaks with conky had to do with third party conky themes, some of which apparently were either not written cleanly, or had misinterpreted visual screen results. The problem with Vivaldi has been fixed in the most recent versions of the browser. Before the fix, I could sit and watch my screen with nothing running on it ... watching the memory usage climb all the way up to 52 percent before it would finally stop. Rebooting fixed those issues temporarily too, but that kind of defeats the purpose of using Linux as your primary OS ...

Greetings from Overseas ...

.