Improve memory usage in Debian

[Hallvor]

Switching to a lighter desktop (or window manager) is a easy and straightforward way to save a huge chunk of system resources but is dependent on a person preferences. Would advise trying any that look interesting to you in live session isos or vm to see if it's something you'd want to do or pursue.

Do you have benchmarks to back up that claim? I posted a link that showed that the difference between KDE and XFCE in real use was less than 100 megabytes.* You may want to call that a huge chunk of system resources, but on most systems, including OP's system, I'd call that negligible.

* KDE was also running more advanced applications.

[CwF]

Waste not, Want not.

Code: Select all

dom0@computer:~$ uptime
 10:42:23 up 43 days, 13:51,  3 users,  load average: 1.73, 3.59, 4.46
dom0@computer:~$ uptime
 09:05:32 up 44 days, 12:15,  3 users,  load average: 1.39, 1.36, 1.36
dom0@computer:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            31G         19G        378M        479M         11G         11G
Swap:          7.6G        874M        6.8G

[Hallvor]

Goodness.. What are you running?

[CwF]

Goodness.. What are you running?

Apparently everything! No, not really. Version 2 of the everything box, still a failure, but really close.

[Deb-fan]

Can only go by stats others post about whichever desktop(s) Last time I'd messed with Gnome, was v 2.4. Mainly think windows managers are the bomb, for me openbox and the 2 Debian installs on my crusty ole lappy both weigh in at under 100mbs-ram(4gbs total) . You're right though with 16gbs any desktop should be negligible. Not that am saying anything bad about all the gnu/Linux desktop choices either. Plenty of amazing stuff to choose from. Wondering if OP was just misreading their memory usage.

There are plenty of credible examples of how to go about optimizing a gnu/nix operating system and the results/impact that doing so can have on resource overhead. Stand by some of the lowest hanging fruit in that is choice of desktop(windows manager) For people whose goal is making it lighter. Well and again someone tweaking their choosen desktop/Os, started out with gnu/Linux Mint 10 (Gnone 2.4) out of box used 270mbs-ram, after tweaking was down to like 124mbs. Same desktop, same Os, 54% reduction in memory usage. Not to mention lower cpu loads, ran faster, smoother and cooler, more stable and with a bunch of unused process disabled has to equal somewhat more secure. Yep would class that example as a huge improvement.

Also, lmao CwF, damn man.

[piperdan]

Just for kicks, I did a quick comparison of how my Debian (Buster) Gnome install with nothing running except a terminal emulator in the desktop and checked the memory usage compared with Fedora 30, Solus-Gnome, OpenSUSE-Gnome (Leap), and Manjaro-Gnome.

Debian-Buster: 750 to 800 MB
Fedora 30: 1100 to 1200 MB
OpenSUSE Leap 15: over 1200 MB
Solus-Gnome: The lightest at just under 700 MB.
Manjaro-Gnome: 1000 - 1100 MB.

Disclaimer - Only Debian was on bare metal. The rest were virtual (in Boxes)

This was all on an old Dell Latitude E6430 with 16 GB RAM and a 250 GB SSD. It's a beast, but runs great on Debian, and no problems whatsoever with Gnome.

[Deb-fan]

^ Hey thanks for that. Cool!

[Deb-fan]

Dang it read the 1st page, then replied being bored and a dork went ahead and read through it all. So ended up with a few more comments. Think lowering swappiness is an essential tweak but agree with the person which said don't set it at zero. Have always seen (and set it to) vm.swappiness=10 as recommended for desktop gnu/nix. The default is 60, way too high imo and with an Ssd people want to minimize disk writes anyway. That's a whole subject itself. Optimizing gnu/nix for ssd's. Something you may want to take up with Google too.

Also agree when that same person advised not troubling too much about disabling startup services/daemons. Particularly if someone doesn't know about it. Example: On a single user system I don't need a display manager to automatically login my user and launch a graphical session. So I disabled lightdm( one display manager) on one OS/install for the heck of it. However doing so saves all of 8mbs-ram and speeds boot by some miniscule amount of time. The amount of ram/boot time you're likely to save and with 16gbs-ram is moot.

Link to the how to auto-login + startx.

Link fixed damn you android!!

[Wheelerof4te]

Keep in mind that GNOME's System Monitor calculates both cached and used memory and displays it as one metric. So, it's a bit inaccurate and actual memory footprint may be lower. My gnome-shell process is using 95 MB of RAM, Chromium with 2 open tabs chomps 828 MB, while System monitor reports total 2.1 GB.
For some reason, gnome-documents is active and chomps whopping 28 MB RAM. I don't even use it, nor did I open it once, lol.
EDIT: I just removed it safely, so no big deal. Still, those 28 MB were too much for a stupid tracker app.

[Deb-fan]

^ Agree with you again but people who are compulsive optimizers are gonna know what they need/don't. Won't take the meta-package route, will install the desktop components they want and what and how to safely disable and remove bloat on a favorite DE/etc. Aka: bloat avoidance and stripping.

[theblueplll]

^ Agree with you again but people who are compulsive optimizers are gonna know what they need/don't. Won't take the meta-package route, will install the desktop components they want and what and how to safely disable and remove bloat on a favorite DE/etc. Aka: bloat avoidance and stripping.

I am pretty obssesive about avoiding bloat I have a big problem with and os or device forcing things on me which is one of the reasons I love Linux so much.
I guess it comes from using windows for all those years and being pissed that I couldn't disable something because something I didn't even use needed it or something I couldn't uninstall because ya know ms said so that I never used.

So now i have the freedom to do so as I please(well sort of some things need to be left alone) so I get out of control with it.

[sickpig]

* KDE was also running more advanced applications.

what's are these "more advanced applications" which openbox cant run under Debian?

[jibberjabber]

Switching to a lighter desktop (or window manager) is a easy and straightforward way to save a huge chunk of system resources but is dependent on a person preferences. Would advise trying any that look interesting to you in live session isos or vm to see if it's something you'd want to do or pursue.

Do you have benchmarks to back up that claim? I posted a link that showed that the difference between KDE and XFCE in real use was less than 100 megabytes.* You may want to call that a huge chunk of system resources, but on most systems, including OP's system, I'd call that negligible.

* KDE was also running more advanced applications.

Where does he say anything about the more advanced applications not running on OpenBox ? Where does he even mention OpenBox ?
The comparison is being made between KDE and XFCE.
=======

yes, my responses were childish, I shall refrain from such behaviour. I agree our forum is no place for non-sense. My apologies.

Talk is cheap, and a empty apology is , well "empty".

[sickpig]

well if openbox can run them then I would like to know what they are so I can do my own memory consumption comparison rather than being dependant on benchmarks. Especially benchmarks posted on reddit aren't too trustworthy for me.

I should probably have framed the question better and asked for the list of "advanced applications" rather than assuming that it meant they wont run on openbox.

Possibly if an application inherently requires compositing to function then of course it will not work on openbox by default.

[vbrummond]

I think the majority of this are caches on my iMac. If I start a few vm nothing slows down, and compressed memory is great. I miss i386 Linux. Running on under 100mb of ram with KDE 3.5. All of that ram was for applications.