Make KDE lighter
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Greetings,
I am using Kubuntu 14 lts on a Toshiba Satellite U400-J10 with 2GB of ram and Kde + Chromium is using 70% + of available Ram memory. The system becomes too slow when other applications are started. I have turned off all desktop effects, changed the Workspace appearance from Oxygen to Plastik and de-activated desktop search. What other things I can do to make my system's footprint smaller? Thanks, Michel |
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occasionally restart Chrome and keep the number of tabs and extensions to a minimum, with it using 70% any adjustment to other processes is gonna be minimal
in Chrome -> More Tools -> Task Manager, you can see which tabs and ext's are using the ram maybe checkout other browsers, though I sometime think if its available the browser will use it when you did those things how much memory did you free up? ram is cheap and 2gb is not so much these days so consider up'ing the amount
OpenSuse Leap 42.1 x64, Plasma 5.x
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Registered Member
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I started using Midori and that resulted in Ram usage in the 50% range. I have another 2GB of Ram available but the Notebook only accepts a maximum of 2GB!
My previous tweaks resulted in the 70% memory usage vs 80% before. Is there a lighter KDE I can use? Thanks, Michel
Last edited by michelmassoud on Sat Mar 28, 2015 1:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Manager
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you have 2 ram slots with a max of 4gb see http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... 1419,d.cWc
it is possible to not have akonadi run, search the forum there should be multiple threads on that if your browser takes up 50%, what % is taken by KDE? Have you tried not using widgets, virtual desktops and activities?
OpenSuse Leap 42.1 x64, Plasma 5.x
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Registered Member
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There are 2 slots and the bios will see 4G but not the OS. http://www.toshiba.eu/discontinued-prod ... -u400-10j/ it indicates a maximum expandability of 2G memory.
Midori is using some 450,000K and KDE + Plasma around 140,000K. 50% is the total OS + Midori footprint I have two widgets (one to monitor system resources!) It is acceptable with Midori but I do not get all the bells and whistles that are offered by Chromium. I can also use Chromium on it's own for browsing when I know I only want to browse. But I guess what is bothering me, is the fact that Windows 7 ran much faster and on this machine, and I was preaching Linux small footprint and speed to windows users! How could 7 be more efficient than Kubuntu? Michel |
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32bit or 64bit ? even a 32bit would see > 2gb but if that's a physical limitation of the bios or motherboard or something
maybe the problem is Chrome on Linux vs Windows? w/o a browser is it fast? consider a different d.e. (LXQT or XFCE) and running KDE apps under it
OpenSuse Leap 42.1 x64, Plasma 5.x
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Administrator
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The "performance" could depend on many, many things. I'm not familiar with your Toshiba Satellite, but I ran Plasma 4 on a Samsung NC10 netbook (2 GB RAM) and everything ran fine. I had compositing (desktop effects) and desktop search enabled, and had Firefox open along with other applications (old screenshot).
Some suggestions: 1. Remove your system monitor on your desktop. In my experience those things can take up some CPU when they redraw themselves every x ms. 2. Do you have the drivers for your graphic card installed? 3. I don't think the memory usage is the main reason for the "slowness" (unless you start putting things in swap). Is there anything that takes up a considerable amount of CPU? 4. Kubuntu has/used to have a package called kubuntu-low-fat-settings that allows you to disable various options to save resources, you can check if it's still available. Finally, if all fails, you may consider a lighter DEs like LXDE/LXQt and XFCE, or just a window manager like Openbox.
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10 things you might want to do in KDE | Open menu with Super key | Mouse shortcuts |
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also check i/o usage, you can use iostat or Ksysguard (by adding additional columns)
OpenSuse Leap 42.1 x64, Plasma 5.x
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> I have two widgets (one to monitor system resources!)
Funny discussion. 1. Stop using plasmoid monitors for system load. They make you look like a real pro (in the eyes of the unskilled), but actually just waste resources with providing no real information (well, ok: they may, if acting correctly, allow for temporal comparism  2. eg. "70% RAM" is meaningless. Period. RAM is also used for the file cache and inactive memory (things that were used and may be used in the future). The virtual memory concept in Linux (and any other modern OS) is *very* complex and any single number is a degenerated sight on it. => Figure how much memory is used for what, you'll find that information by "cat /proc/meminfo" The lines you care most about are Active, Active(anon) and Active(file) (Active being the sum of the two latter) 3. If there's indeed high load in active memory, you should check what in particular consumes it. For a *rough* start call "top", press "Shift+M" and check the "RES" column. If something is using exceptionally much RAM, it's time to look into that process and check where and for what it wastes it (might be leak, might be fragmentation, might be actual requirement) 4. Mapping "Memory" to "Speed" is nonsense. "Speed" is an indefinite term. And OSs do not "run" (where would they head for?) - neither fast nor slow. They abstract between applications and the Hardware. If you feel "something" (what in particular?!) should act "faster" you need to check why! it's slow and if you're (as apparently) running chromium as a single task application (don't use any DE itfp?) the limiting factor will be most likely the GPU, ie. wrong or bad driver or a resource usage conflict between the OpenGL compositor (the compositing process in X11 is about as inefficient as it could be - that's because X11 is 30 years old) and the GL client (the browser) - or chromium has deactivated HW acceleration for considering your driver unreliable or whatnot. => 1st: specify "what" - we'll then look into "why". (In case the above assumptions hold, try to suspend the compositor - SHIFT+Alt+F12 - and check HW acceleration in "about:flags" <- type that into chromium) |
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I'm running 64 bit Kubuntu
I installed the Intel driver video driver and that made a lot of difference when I did. I used "The Intel Graphics Installer for Linux" and it worked well until a couple of kernel updates ago. Now it tells me "Distribution not supported" lsusb gives the following results: Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187B Wireless Adapter Bus 002 Device 003: ID 04f2:b008 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd USB 2.0 Camera Bus 002 Device 005: ID 03f0:5817 Hewlett-Packard LaserJet M1319f MFP Bus 002 Device 002: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 002: ID 0930:0508 Toshiba Corp. Integrated Bluetooth HCI Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Low fat setting is not available anymore it seems. michel@michel-Satellite-L650:~$ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 2040572 kB MemFree: 263488 kB Buffers: 40292 kB Cached: 610832 kB SwapCached: 124980 kB Active: 815516 kB Inactive: 795720 kB Active(anon): 544348 kB Inactive(anon): 543604 kB Active(file): 271168 kB Inactive(file): 252116 kB Unevictable: 64 kB Mlocked: 64 kB SwapTotal: 2085884 kB SwapFree: 1644656 kB Dirty: 136 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 888936 kB Mapped: 180672 kB Shmem: 127828 kB Slab: 90252 kB SReclaimable: 57880 kB SUnreclaim: 32372 kB KernelStack: 3512 kB PageTables: 40596 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 3106168 kB Committed_AS: 3232704 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 541220 kB VmallocChunk: 34359189084 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB AnonHugePages: 245760 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB DirectMap4k: 88896 kB DirectMap2M: 1998848 kB The total active with Midori , Skype and Synaptic is at 815,000 is that too high? Midori is using around 21% of mem and the rest around 5% michel@michel-Satellite-L650:~$ top top - 19:53:48 up 1 day, 2:40, 2 users, load average: 0.17, 0.18, 0.21 Tasks: 179 total, 1 running, 177 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie %Cpu(s): 4.3 us, 2.2 sy, 0.0 ni, 93.5 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st KiB Mem: 2040572 total, 1757832 used, 282740 free, 47372 buffers KiB Swap: 2085884 total, 441144 used, 1644740 free. 630160 cached Mem The "slow" issue is 1- unacceptable latency when the computer starts running so slow that I have to wait 15 to 20 seconds to move from one program to the other and when I do not know if my mouse clicks have registered or not. Screens take forever to redraw. 2- It is in comparison to how 7 used to run on the same machine with Chrome, outlook, Msaccess, word, excel and I tune running at the same time. It was not blasting away, but my wife was satisfied 3- How it compares to how the same distro was running on the Toshiba Satellite -L650 that I gave her. My experience, until now, has always been that Linux woul always run faster than Windows on similar machines and will do more with the same resources ie allow for better latency, faster i/o and load more programs simultaneously. What gives? Michel |
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Please use the driver provided by your distribution.
If you're on the VESA driver (seems so?), you're in quite some trouble. It can make pixels colorful, but that's it.
That's irrelevant. a) because usb would be FAR to slow for graphics operations (try "lspci") and b) because this only polls vendor and product IDs and maps them to human readable names from a database. => Relevant data is the output of "glxinfo" and the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log - please either use paste.kde.org or post them in code tags (it's a lot of text)
It's pretty much normal that browsers take a massive amount of RAM, so no surprise here. Assuming a "fair share" on RAM usage (from your percentages), that means the rest of the system has ~150MB of active RAM usage, what sounds pretty much ok (wallpaper, icons, gradients, all that useless fancy stuff
a) likely VESA driver, thus also no compositing (causing repaint demands in every exposed region by altering the order of the window stack. There's no backing store in the VESA driver and it's also disabled for most drivers by default nowerdays) nor any hardware acceleration in webkit. b) possibly additional I/O load, eg. by Baloo indexing running wild. Install and check "iotop" (it requires root privilegues, run "sudo iotop" in konsole, xterm or VT1)
You're comparing an OS to a kernel. Linux has its advantages over the NTOS kernel, but the major overhead on windows are all the services it runs (and that dll copy-a-round...) You can eg. easily make any "Linux" perform "horribly" by typing "  ){  :& };:" into bash. (DO NOT DO THAT! IT'S A FORK BOMB! - Seriously.)The advantages come from selecting proper schedulers for your demands (where Ubuntu makes a questionable selection for desktop systems, see eg. https://blogs.kde.org/2014/10/15/ubuntu ... ystem-1404 - the deadline scheduler is for servers, really), low daemon count, a tremendous network stack and FS which are newer design and technically ahead of -pretty aged- NTFS (which was not bad at all when MS bought it from HP  and such.
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Registered Member
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I am not running versa for sure and the performance with Midori is acceptable. My description of slow pertained to usage with Chromium. My beef now is that I would like the Midori situation but with Chromium or Chrome AND to be faster and more efficient than Windows!
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 03) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (secondary) (rev 03) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03) 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 03) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03) 07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040T PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 12) 0a:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): O2 Micro, Inc. Firewire (IEEE 1394) (rev 02) 0a:01.2 SD Host controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MMC/SD Controller (rev 02) 0a:01.3 Mass storage controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MS/xD Controller (rev 01) Everything looks OK. Even the I/O drivers are in order.
iotop shows kworker, init , kthreadd and ksoftirqd generating traffic
So what is the most "efficient" KDE distro in your opinion? Michel |
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Again: the outputs of lsusb and lspci tell you what hardware is present by polling vendor and product IDs and translate the from a database. They provide NO information about the used drivers (but that's irrelevant in this case)
No distro hopping please, you can adjust the scheduler even at runtime, if you want. Back on topic: Apparently there's no unnatural I/O (the processes usually top during idle and you did not mention relative or absolute IO loads) and you're operating on the intel driver and working GL. => You're apparent problem does not seem to be KDE or anything but Chromium ("and Chromium alone")? a) you're likely on the wrong forum then (since this would be a chromium issue rather than a linux, let alone KDE, issue) b) you can enter "about:flags" in chromium and adjust settings, notably dis/enable hardware acceleration. You should check CPU, RAM and I/O load while chromium is running, of course. Inspecting a "sane" system state tells you nothing about a problematic system state. Given chromium is "who", you need to figure *what* bottleneck chromium is causing and then *why* and finally *how* to fix that. This may be just a bug in the particular chromium version. In general, you cannot expect an OS or kernel to make a slow application go faster. (Let alone other processes (eg. "KDE", being plasma etc.)) Slow code is just slow. |
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Registered Member
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Thanks for all the insight and I am quite happy with Kubuntu provided I get acceptable performance from it so how do you
I will look into Chromium on the Chromium forum. Michel |
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See eg. http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/iosched.htm
It's per-disk and will not survive reboots ("runtime", ye know cfq is usually a good choice for desktop systems (and the kernel default in this context) ionicing comes very handy with any kind of background task (eg. I aliased "make" to be ionice) |
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