Hi,

I've been using KDE in Linux mint and often find memory usage exceeding 700-800MB even though i've only Firefox or chrome browser and then maybe skype. On looking up in system monitor, find there are lot of bash shells running even though i hadn't invoked bash. Lots of getty, winbindd, kio_trash and many more processes like that. Obviously killing them would be easy but don't want to bork the system so kept them untouched. Is there memory leak or some other issue in KDE.

Anyone has any idea how to reduce memory usage. Also would like to know what all services can i keep enabled while disabling the rest in order to have a functional desktop. My main work would be browsing using ethernet/wireless and using skype.

Not sure if i've reached the right forum, if not, please advise where i can ask these questions.

Thanks.

1st thing you should do is open the system monitor and figure out what's actually using your ram. Does the 700-800mb used include buffers and cache, as Linux will use any unused ram for these.

Browsers can use lots of ram (might be exasperated by the use of addons and plugins, definitely by the multiplicity of tabs) and I'm not sure browsers release their ram when tabs are closed. See http://cybernetnews.com/reduce-firefoxs-memory-usage/

There were lot of processes that were sharing memory, so was not sure if i could kill them.

This was the snapshot of memory usage in my system at one point (it does fluctuate quite wildly at times, even though there's no new activity going on) which made me wonder about any leaks, just a thought.

free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2052304 1633984 418320 0 65428 1140616
-/+ buffers/cache: 427940 1624364
Swap: 6766120 0 6766120

Yes, i do agree the browsers consume lot of memory so not opening lot of tabs and keeping it very minimum to two or three.

It appears that only 427MB of RAM is being used in the data you have provided, and that no swap is in use. An additional 1140MB of RAM is being used as a disk cache, and 65MB as a disk buffer. These increase the speed of your system. Finally, 418MB is completely unused.

This memory usage, while slightly high, is nothing too concerning. If it grows rapidly during daily use ( ie. increases by 1.5x ) then there may be a problem.

The only major thing you can do to reduce memory usage is to close programs running in the tray that you do not use constantly ( An update checker applet for instance )