Why LINUX (Ubuntu) is now my main Desktop OS.

On my HP Pavilion a1520n .....Desktop (not notebook)
1GB RAM, AMD 64 X2 , Nvidia Geforce 6150 LE

On Ubuntu Feisty (Beta)

I was able to run all these apps/programs without using over 450MB RAM.

Gdesklets ..(widgets for linux) 2 partition info, and Mem info widgets.
Firefox browser
Totem Movie player .. (Playing a .avi movie)
Weather app on bottom panel
Azureus .. (Running 2 torrents)
VMWare ....(Running Windows XP Pro)
Apps running under VMWare XP are ....... Avast AV, Firefox, Itunes, POPPeeper,
and whatever other processes Windows xp has running.

Everything ran smoothly, even VMWare which is hard to run this smooth on Windows.

Without playing the .avi video, it be be down to 3**MB RAM. I could have opened alot more apps and still kept it under 512MB, But I tried to kept Usage realistic. At least my usage. Minus playing the Video. Even when running Beryl (eyecandy), it still stays in low mem usage.

Under Windows XP or Vista this would be impossible, and for somebody with only 512MB it would mean kaos.

I'm going to see how much Ubuntu can handle on my Acer Laptop now.

Heres a pic ..... my desktop is usually not that crowded, but I wanted to place everything on one workspace for pic.

 

Wow that's pretty awesome! Now I'm tempted to try VMWare... usually I just dual boot.

 

My memory consumption is sometimes around 450MB, but often it is consistently over 1GB!!!

I'm running Kubuntu 6.10 with KDE 3.5.5. Usually I have the following running:
- Beryl interface +Beryl Manager
- knetworkmanager
- power manager
- firefox
- kopete

This high consumption is very much unlike what others are reporting and I am somewhat disappointed; still, I think its a problem. Personally I suspect that KDE is running at the same time as Beryl. Could this account for the high RAM usage?

PS; did some reading:
"... Linux heavily and aggressively caches your data, resulting in high performance. On a 1GB RAM workstation @ school, Linux usually leaves less than 10MB free, and after a day of use practically everything from Firefox to Openoffice is cached, launching almost instantaneously...

As soon as another application needs more RAM, Linux will let go of some caches and turn that freed RAM over.

Truly "free" RAM is wasted RAM."

 

Beryl runs on top of Xgl/AIGLX, which in turn runs on top of X/KDE. Using Beryl doesn't overwrite anything in KDE, so yes, both would contribute.

My Kubuntu install usually uses about 750MB of ram on a cold boot. This is normal. It caches things like Konqueror, OOo and Amarok so that they open faster. This is a feature Vista tried to emulate, albeit their implementation needs some tweaking.

 

I take it then that 1GB of usage at boot-time is normal, then?

The idea of free RAM being wasted RAM is definitely not an idea I embraced as a Windows user, but it makes perfect sense!

 

Well, whatever it is, I am glad to hear that Linux is now your main OS.

 

Definitely true. Linux does a great job of caching disk files and really helps speed the system. If you look at the program "top" you can see the vital statistics of many parts of your system, including RAM usage for cache. When you do look, note that there are a few fields for memory usage for each program. "Res" is the actual amount of RAM taken up by the process - "size" shows the virtual memory (including shared libraries/modules) assigned to each process and for the casual user is just of interest. See Top manpage for more info.

 

I never Boot-up with that much ram you guys are talking about. Not even on my laptop. My boots are usually from 250-350mb. And everything starts up quickly. Is this a KDE thing?

 

No. It gets that way after a little bit of use. On fresh boot-up, not everything is loaded, files aren't all cached, etc. But when you run it for more than a few hours, you start filling your RAM with everything that's necessary to run (or has been run recently), with only a few megs left over.

 

well, if you're looking at the GNOME system monitor, the memory reading it shows is the "user" field, which is the RAM actively being used by programs, and not what is cached.

 

I'm really hesitant to bother looking at the ram used, because, as far as I'm aware, it's never as simple as "ram used" -- it's more like "ram shared, ram allocated, ram staying for tea, ram actively in use...", with no intuitive deliniation of which numbers correspond to which things.

I just try to use stuff, and if the programs act perky, I'm happy. Else, I'm not.

 

Welcome to the REVOLUTION

 

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Holy ginormous overpowering signature and post, Batman!

 

Rat morningstar !!!

 

There made my sig smaller, sorry bout that : )