Kubuntu 11.10 gradually uses a lot of RAM and Swap

[lindsay_keir]

I have(?)/had the same problem - memory is NOT being released after a task is closed. Quite evident in System Monitor. For examples: I had 3 entries for the 3 videos I watched last night; 3 java entries for the 3 times I re-started RedCar; etc, etc. Sometimes they pop-ed up with a <i>disk sleep</i>

Anyway, just before re-booting I did the search and found this page, AND a page about installing the <b>kubuntu-low-fat-settings</b> apt-package. Which I did. My System Monitor's task icon was "seized" afterward; but I just re-clicked it from K-menu - <b>and the memory holds have gone away!</b> Without a re-boot.

PS: The only task that behaved normally in the memory area was Firefox.

Anyway maybe it's all just a coincidence and I'll end up going through the "top" and "free m" things - although why I don't know.

[SteveRiley]

Can't wait till HTML5 is the standard and Flash just goes away.

In open source land, we are blessed with Okular, a wonderful PDF reader. I dearly wish LightSpark were an equivalently-capable FLV player. I suspect the problem lies more with Adobe intentionally making FLV problematic for third-party viewers...

[utherpendragonfly]

Yes, I have Minitube installed. We use it on a laptop running Xubuntu, too. It's great! But a lot of times I'm looking at an article or review and just click on a link to watch a brief video.
Can't wait till HTML5 is the standard and Flash just goes away.

[dequire]

You also might want to try Mintube (it's in the repositories). You can watch Youtube to your heart's content w/o using Flash \m/

[utherpendragonfly]

@utherpendragonfly:Changing the swap ratio will only help to reduce the swap usage , it wouldnt have any direct effect on ram usage.
try using a different browser and check if it really is a firefox problem
and i forgot to ask what is the ram status at startup

After startup RAM is around 0.6 Gb.
And I should have realized Flash may be a big part of the problem with Firefox. I was just watching flash video and RAM was up to 1.9 Gb. But after closing Firefox and restarting it was back down to 0.9 Gb.
I've noticed today that RAM goes back down to reasonable level after quitting multiple apps. And no swap usage today. Maybe setting swapiness = 10 helped also?
Anyway; I suppose rebooting every few days is not that big a deal!

[rms]

This is kind of crazy! I'm only using Firefox and Konsole.
Could Firefox be that much of a problem?

Firefox is not so much a problem as Flash player plugin. Watch videos on Youtube or some other video site for 1/2 hours and note Firefox's memory usage. That memory is not completely released even if you restart Firefox. Also parallel browsing in several tabs sometimes gives amuzing results. I think you should reboot every day if possible to evade all this.

[r]

@utherpendragonfly:Changing the swap ratio will only help to reduce the swap usage , it wouldnt have any direct effect on ram usage.
try using a different browser and check if it really is a firefox problem
and i forgot to ask what is the ram status at startup

[SecretCode]

All with RAM issues, I'd like to see the output of the following command:

ps -e -o pid,comm,etime,time,%cpu,%mem,rss,vsz --sort -rss | head -n 6

What does it do? It shows the top 5 processes ordered by resident memory (rss), with details of how long it's been running, how much CPU it's used, and how much memory it's currently using.

Mine is:

  PID COMMAND             ELAPSED     TIME %CPU %MEM   RSS    VSZ
 7633 firefox               08:34 00:01:18 15.3  8.6 352276 1181240
 1313 Xorg               19:37:33 00:24:49  2.1  4.7 191180 633384
 3491 thunderbird-bin    18:48:25 00:12:13  1.0  4.0 164672 1161148
 1947 kwin               19:37:14 00:18:55  1.6  3.0 121948 820724
 7661 soffice.bin           08:28 00:00:04  0.8  2.9 119100 770812

Which shows Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice (soffice.bin) using average-to-low amounts of memory for complex apps. And Xorg and kwin using ... not too much yet.

[utherpendragonfly]

I tried this:
sudo sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10
RAM usage is down to 1.1 Gb for now. I'll see what happens in the next few days...

[SecretCode]

Does this really mean my system is using almost 2 GB of RAM?! Sysytem monitor widget reports 1.1 GB (no... it just went up to 1.2 Gb in the past minute) This is kind of crazy! I'm only using Firefox and Konsole.
Could Firefox be that much of a problem?

It means *thinks* you're using 1155MB of RAM - not including buffers and cache. Which is the value you should care about.

If you hit Ctrl-Esc, System Activity will show you the "Memory" for each process, and you can sort by it. Or, go to the command line and use htop; again you can sort by it (you want the RES column).

[SecretCode]

Hi all...

I don't think it's limited to Kubuntu, I'm running Ubuntu 10,04 and have found this...

My current free memory is not a problem. Not sure why I even posted the output!

I was using Ubuntu 10.10 for while (and 9.10 before that), and I didn't see this gradual increase in RAM usage.

[utherpendragonfly]

I find the same thing. To the extent that sometimes it feels like Kubuntu is turning into Windows.

Firefox is a memory hog for sure, but if I restart it from time to time other processes still climb up the rankings: Xorg, kwin and plasma-desktop. I rebooted today so they're still pretty low, but over several days can easily climb to several 100 MBs. (I don't recall knotify ever being high in the list.)

Use of swap on my machine is very slow, but I generally manage to avoid it.

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3961       2364       1596          0         58        546
-/+ buffers/cache:       1759       2201
Swap:         4102        275       3826

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60

I checked out valgrind but I don't think I know enough to be able to use it! I wish there was a gui app for this.
I just got this:
davey@davey-MS-7597:~$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3709 2064 1645 0 155 753
-/+ buffers/cache: 1155 2554
Swap: 3092 0 3092

Does this really mean my system is using almost 2 GB of RAM?! Sysytem monitor widget reports 1.1 GB (no... it just went up to 1.2 Gb in the past minute) This is kind of crazy! I'm only using Firefox and Konsole.
Could Firefox be that much of a problem?

[ardvark71]

Hi all...

I don't think it's limited to Kubuntu, I'm running Ubuntu 10,04 and have found this...

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3964       1804       2159          0         98        799
-/+ buffers/cache:        906       3057
Swap:        11611          0      11611

I'm not running anything special, either.

I did find this if it helps a little.

Regards...

[SecretCode]

I find the same thing. To the extent that sometimes it feels like Kubuntu is turning into Windows.

Firefox is a memory hog for sure, but if I restart it from time to time other processes still climb up the rankings: Xorg, kwin and plasma-desktop. I rebooted today so they're still pretty low, but over several days can easily climb to several 100 MBs. (I don't recall knotify ever being high in the list.)

Use of swap on my machine is very slow, but I generally manage to avoid it.

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3961       2364       1596          0         58        546
-/+ buffers/cache:       1759       2201
Swap:         4102        275       3826

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60

[utherpendragonfly]

Possibly, something on your system has a memory leak. Finding these, without source code, can be difficult. It'll be interesting to see what top shows after the next day.

Today RAM usage is up to 2.0 Gb, according to system monitor. When I check top Xorg is using 8.8%; then Firefox 7%; Knotify and Plasma-desktop & Kwin all around 3.5%. Also the other user account (my wife's) shows Knotify around 2 or 3%. No swap being used at the moment.
I've got to find out how to detect a memory leak and what I can do about it.