Ram usage linux mint

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How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by benali72 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 1:17 am

How much RAM does your Mint system use?

I’m curious of much real memory everyone here uses when running Mint and their typical applications. I run 32-bit Mint 17 and my system rarely uses a full gig of real ram. And it never uses more than a tiny sliver of swap.

In typical use, I run firefox (with several tabs open), an HTML editor, a text editor, a terminal window, and the caja file manager.

Would some kind folk here like to share their memory use stats?

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z31fanatic Level 5
Posts: 890 Joined: Sat Feb 14, 2015 5:25 pm Location: Pennsylvania

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by z31fanatic » Tue Mar 03, 2015 3:36 am

4 tabs on Chrome and nothing else, it’s 1.2gb. Chrome is a memory hog. I don’t worry though, I have 16GB of RAM on this machine.

Pierre Level 21
Posts: 12958 Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2008 5:33 am Location: Perth, AU.

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by Pierre » Tue Mar 03, 2015 4:04 am

depends on what you are doing — of course.

But: Gimp really needs the RAM . ..
so — that’s *not* on this PC

and on idle — with nothing running, but the O/S — it’s a mere 205Mb/

Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] — when your problem is solved!
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Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by 1.618 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:46 am

I only have a paltry 4Gig on this box using mint 17 mate,

banshee/system monitor and firefox to post this it says 589.9Mib
Sitting idle after boot it says 303 Mib
4 seperate firefox instances (not tabs) banshee and system monitor says 625.8 Mib
4firefox instances, 1 streaming from youtube, gimp,banshee,torbrowser,klotski,mahjong, caja,image veiwer and system monitor it syas 924Mib

and no swap at all with any of those

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by niowluka » Tue Mar 03, 2015 8:00 am

Typically mine uses 0.9 — 1.5G, depending on what’s running in the background, etc. Most I ever see is 2 — 2.5G, unless I’m running a VM.

Flemur Level 20
Posts: 10097 Joined: Mon Aug 20, 2012 9:41 pm Location: Potemkin Village

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by Flemur » Tue Mar 03, 2015 12:41 pm

 7.3 MiB + 42.0 KiB = 7.4 MiB dhclient 5.5 MiB + 4.9 MiB = 10.4 MiB lxterminal 49.2 MiB + 1.4 MiB = 50.6 MiB Xorg 284.0 MiB + 5.7 MiB = 289.8 MiB iceweasel ** --------------------------------- 406.4 MiB

Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] if/when it is solved!
Your data and OS are backed up. right?

dXTC Level 4
Posts: 207 Joined: Fri Dec 26, 2014 3:19 pm Location: Closer to the Derby than I care to admit

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by dXTC » Tue Mar 03, 2015 2:52 pm

 7.3 MiB + 42.0 KiB = 7.4 MiB dhclient 5.5 MiB + 4.9 MiB = 10.4 MiB lxterminal 49.2 MiB + 1.4 MiB = 50.6 MiB Xorg 284.0 MiB + 5.7 MiB = 289.8 MiB iceweasel ** --------------------------------- 406.4 MiB

(raises hand)
Quick question from a noob: Did you get this from a Terminal command, and if so, what is it? I like the details.

phd21 Level 20
Posts: 10102 Joined: Thu Jan 09, 2014 9:42 pm Location: Florida

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by phd21 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 3:47 pm

benali72 wrote: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

I’m curious of much real memory everyone here uses when running Mint and their typical applications. I run 32-bit Mint 17 and my system rarely uses a full gig of real ram. And it never uses more than a tiny sliver of swap.

In typical use, I run firefox (with several tabs open), an HTML editor, a text editor, a terminal window, and the caja file manager.

Would some kind folk here like to share their memory use stats?

Good Interesting question. I’m using Linux Mint 17.1 KDE Rebecca 32-bit with only 2gb Ram on older hardware, see my signature line. Right now, I have a fully loaded LM 17.1 KDE system with desktop Weather app (my-weather-indicator), Fortune Cookies (fortunoid Quotes), various hardware sensors, GKrellm desktop sensors, MySql server, and Firefox with 16 open tabs using lots of plugins and extensions, including Google Talk, etc.

Ram in use now is 1257 mb and 754 mb free, around 450-500 mb right after booting up before starting FireFox, cpu usage at boot is 0-4%, and 20-25% now — according to the cool GKrellm desktop sensors. Obviously, when you run something else these figures jump around, then settle back down, but that’s normal.

Phd21 : Mint 20 Cinnamon & xKDE (Mint Xfce + Kubuntu KDE) & KDE Neon 64-bit (new based on Ubuntu 20.04) Awesome OS’s , Dell Inspiron I5 7000 (7573) 2 in 1 touch screen, Dell OptiPlex 780 Core2Duo E8400 3GHz,4gb Ram, Intel 4 Graphics.

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by r00t » Tue Mar 03, 2015 10:17 pm

free -m tells me that I’m using just over 1GB of RAM. I’m running VLC (playing a 10-hour long video), connected through a bouncer to 3 IRC networks (27 channels total) with major activity in most. I’m also running firefox with a few tabs open. From past experience, I know that VLC is the biggest RAM gobbler

EDIT: I use the 64-bit version (forgot to add that in the first time)

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xfrank Level 5
Posts: 616 Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 6:09 pm Location: Mexico City Contact:

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by xfrank » Tue Mar 03, 2015 10:24 pm

1,1 GB with 4 Firefox tabs open. But I have all my temporary/log files in tmpfs (in RAM). I never saw my RAM usage close or over 2GB (and I have 8GB).
My Mint is LMDE Mate.

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by benali72 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 11:44 pm

Thanks for the responses. Interesting points I’ve learned here —

* Apps like Virtual Machines and Gimp eat up some ram, maybe Chrome too with some tabs open
* A heavier Mint GUI requires more ram (probably one reason my system consistently uses under 1 gig is that I run Mint with XFCE)
* 64 bit version Mint eats a little more ram than 32 bit version

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by DeMus » Wed Mar 04, 2015 3:32 pm

4.8GB out of 16GB real ram and another 25GB of swap space
I wish it would use more, I have paid for it and I want Mint to use it to make my computer even faster. Put everything in ram, well, everything I normally use, and so it is there whenever I should need it.

Flemur Level 20
Posts: 10097 Joined: Mon Aug 20, 2012 9:41 pm Location: Potemkin Village

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by Flemur » Thu Mar 05, 2015 1:23 pm

A heavier Mint GUI requires more ram (probably one reason my system consistently uses under 1 gig is that I run Mint with XFCE)

Yup. Mint 17.1 KDE used about 500M at boot, M17 fluxbox system slightly less than 100M, with fluxbox itself usually using around 5M.

Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] if/when it is solved!
Your data and OS are backed up. right?

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by benali72 » Thu Mar 05, 2015 1:51 pm

DeMus, are you looking at the GUI ram usage statistics provided by the System Monitor?

If so, the ram usage number it provides does not include ram used for buffering.

For example, on my system right now System Monitor tells me I’m using 625 Meg of memory and no swap at all.

But if I issue free -m to the command line, I find the system uses an additional 1.1 gig of ram for buffering.

I bring this up because perhaps your system is using more ram than it looked like because of buffering?

Just an idea. Perhaps you already knew this. Cheers.

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by 1.618 » Fri Mar 06, 2015 5:56 pm

On an old laptop i installed mint 17 mate on for a neighbour,

bios says 2008
2.00GHz
1.5g ram

after boot, 177.4 Mib
banshee, 4 firefox instances, system monitor 510 mib
banshee, 4 firefox instances (1 streaming from youtube) gimp, klotski, mahjong, torbrowser, caja, image veiwer, system monitor 757.4mib

no swap with any of those.

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by xenopeek » Sat Mar 07, 2015 7:28 am

I wonder what the cutoff amount of RAM is where below it you are proud of your OS using as little RAM as possible and where above it you’d instead be heartened to see your OS using as much of your RAM as possible to optimize its performance?

I think for me it’s around 4 GB. Below that I’d be counting bytes of RAM like a miser but above it I’m disheartened if my OS doesn’t make an effort to utilize as much as possible of the RAM I paid for

$ free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15G 6.7G 160M 311M 8.3G 7.9G Swap: 0B 0B 0B 

xfrank Level 5
Posts: 616 Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 6:09 pm Location: Mexico City Contact:

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by xfrank » Sat Mar 07, 2015 11:29 am

Amazing! I never ever had so much RAM consumption in my digital life. Can’t even figure how to fill the RAM like you: photos? videos?

Seriously, when the RAM is abundant (I have 8GB) is good to use it as much as possible, but how?

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by xenopeek » Sat Mar 07, 2015 12:50 pm

I have a long list of distros installed in VirtualBox. Launch a few of those over the day, memory gets eaten fast I bought the 16 GB RAM specifically for that purpose, being able without worry to run multiple virtual machines at the same time. Initially to support here on the forums (having all Linux Mint editions just a few clicks away to launch), but I’ve found a lot of use with them for my own experimenting and testing.

Re: How much RAM does your Mint system use?

Post by DeMus » Sun Mar 08, 2015 10:23 am

xenopeek wrote: I wonder what the cutoff amount of RAM is where below it you are proud of your OS using as little RAM as possible and where above it you’d instead be heartened to see your OS using as much of your RAM as possible to optimize its performance?

I think for me it’s around 4 GB. Below that I’d be counting bytes of RAM like a miser but above it I’m disheartened if my OS doesn’t make an effort to utilize as much as possible of the RAM I paid for

$ free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15G 6.7G 160M 311M 8.3G 7.9G Swap: 0B 0B 0B 

My idea exactly, when you have ram, use it. Either by programs you use at the moment or by ones you have used and which stay in memory so they can be reactivated very fast.
The same is true for processors. People buy a nice fast processor and then complain when it is being used (too) much by the OS. Why? You have paid for the thing, now use it.
Compare this to a car you have bought and which can drive 200km/h. Will you settle for 80? No, of course not, you want to go faster, that’s why you bought the car, right?

@benali72
Yes, I do know about the buffers and yes I was looking at the GUI system monitor. You are right to mention this. As I wrote here before, I want my memory to be full, either with active programs or with stuff in the buffers. When I start another program which is not yet in memory then buffer space will be cleared and the new program will fit in.
This way you make use of your computer to the max.

Источник

How To View CPU And Memory Usage Graphically In Ubuntu / Linux Mint

Just like Microsoft Windows has it’s default task manager that can display list of runninng services, utilization of CPU and memory as well as other system resources, Ubuntu / Linux Mint too comes with it’s own task manager. It is termed “System Monitor” and can be easily used to view how much RAM, CPU and what kind of processes are running in an easy to view graphical format.

To view it, go to Menu > System Tools > System Monitor.

Each of the four tabs (System, Processes, Resources and File Systems) will display the related info.

The System tab displays the general overall information of current Ubuntu / Linux Mint system.

The Processes tab displays the list of running processes. The View  > All Processes option after selecting the Processes tab will display all of the processes as compared to the default view that only lists current logged in user owned processes.

The Resources tab will list the usage of RAM, CPU and network utilization graphically.

The File Systems tab will display the list of mounted file systems (showing both internal disk systems as well as external ones).

System Monitor is an easy to use graphical tool. For doing the same through command line, check out how htop and free -m commands can be used.

Источник