Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Memory usage - 2009.1 with KDE4

Running Mandriva 2009.1 on my EEE pc, I am sensitive to performance, as it’s a fairly low end system. 900 Mhz, 1GB ram, and also have laptop with only 192 MB .    I could not understand why plasma was using 47 MB of ram and some other processes where also really hogging a lot of ram considering what they do.  The tools I am going to pick on are:

mdkapplet (14 MB), net_applet (19MB), redhat printer config tool (8MB), codina update (20 MB when running.. stops sometime after login).

I wonder if something can be done to make these tools use less ram.  I  like net_applet, but can’t have it using that much ram on a low end system.

In: /usr/share/autostart
I removed some things:

  • mandriva-galaxy.desktop ( I think this must just exit anyway if the use has closed the initial popup)
  • mandriva-mdvonline.desktop
  • nepomukserver.desktop  ( I wonder if I need this or not.. don’t know)
  • net_applet.desktop

In: /etc/xdg/autostart, I removed:

  • redhat-print-applet.desktop  ( I don’t print )

Doing this got plasma down to using 14 MB or ram and  206MB total memory usage, instead of 235 MB. (Read using free -m, -/+ buffers/cache row). It didn’t have much effect on my usage.  I now start netapplet from the menu when I want to change my network settings, and auto updates won’t happen (which I never use anyway).