I would like to discuss a very peculiar "problem" i've noticed in KDE.

Each time I compare any KDE app memory consumption, there is a ginormous difference among each different machine.

For instance, Kmix in my Intel Atom, GMA 950 netbook consumes about 2.8MB of memory, but, in my Athlon II X3, geforce 7600 machine, it's about 8 times larger! 21.8MB

It's to my knowledge that the nvidia binary drivers tend to consume more resources than the others. But trying Vesa or Nouveau won't change this scenario!

Both of my virtual machines running KDE also have different memory consumptions. Arround 5MB for Kmix.

Both of my real machines run ArchLinux 32bits without composition. In the virtual side, I run Kubuntu 10.10 and a test ArchLinux machine with KDE SVN.
Kubuntu is composited.



GTK and QT apps seams not to exhibit this problem. But I'm also unable to determine what is wrong. Oxygen widget should not be the problem, as i'm running qtcurve in most machines. At least not the main one.

It's kinda funny that my netbook can have a footprint smaller than a vanilla GNOME DE (footprint, got it? haha), but my main desktop hogs a lot of memory for no apparent reason!

Is there any kind of insightful analysis that could be done? Does anybody else see this happening with their machine?

I would like to at least foster discussion about this issue...

Tools such as Exmap may be able to provide more information on to why this occurs. KMix uses 15.6 MB of RAM on my system.

Please note that the algorithm used to calculate memory in use changed between KDE versions, are the versions being used on these systems the same.