MX Linux Forum

Conky and Yakuake are disabled.
Dropbox and Redshift are loaded and running from startup.

Spectacle and Vivaldi are running here for screenshot, so 3G is "normal" i guess:
https://snipboard.io/QqiDmK.jpg

Always thought KDE was supposed to be almost as good now as XFCE for low resource usage.

Btw, is there a way to turn off "disk writes"?

2.6GB is normal on my computer. I personally wouldn't trust Stacer. Check your memory in Htop and you can see where all your RAM is being used. As for disk writes you can try adjusting Swapiness down to 10. Adding more RAM to your computer works too. How much RAM do you have?

For the top 20:

https://justpaste.it/7nru7

Have 8G of RAM but the laptop won't use more than 4G.

Have everything on /
No swap partition (unfamiliar at creating swapiness).

It's already set to 15 (when 15% left empty => when 6.80 GB used). No need to play with it.

Also you can check / compare the mem usage with free -mw

For the disk writes, first you have to determine what process is doing the writes, and tell us how you are monitoring those.
Chromium-based browsers, as well as Firefox, are infamous for backing up their states to disk every few seconds, which ends up writing way too much to the disk over time. You can change those settings in Firefox and the other browsers to something more sane, like every five minutes, but I'm going to leave the very easy web search for the procedure as an exercise.

MX 19 ships with that low swappiness as a default, after many suggestions that we do so.

This line suggests that you have 8 GB RAM and 8 GB swap, and the system can see all of it:
How are you determining that it can't use more than 4 GB RAM?

... So your vivaldi-bin is the involved ... try to configure it, you can use Palemoon (lighter with less kworkers process )

Not unusual. I am regularly around 3 GB with Google Chrome running. 1.8 GB with no apps running . It is no different in XFCE or KDE.

@Huckleberry Finn:
$ free -mw
total used free shared buffers cache available
Mem: 15967 1794 11738 119 85 2349 13719
Swap: 0 0 0

@Stevo:
-cause that's what the computer repair guy told me so when he only had an 8G stick to put in instead of a 4G.
-this HP will only use up to 4G of RAM he said.
-think i found info on the web too (once upon a time...)

@richb:
-so, 2.6G of RAM is okay when "nothing" is running?

Yes, but it looks like there're 2 x 8 GB sticks (or so) ..

P.S. If you like, you can: or

It really depends what program you use to see RAM usage: Stacer says 3.6GiB, inxi says 2.78GiB, and the system monitor says 1.8GiB, but as you (almost) see in 'free' there's also 3.8GiB in 'buff/cache'.

It, 3.6 GB RAM, is OK as far as I am concerned. It is well within my 16 GB and does not cause any issues

@Huckleberry Finn:

Yabutt, if my "memory" serves me well (ha!), i could put up to two 4G sticks.

Memory: RAM: total: 15.59 GiB used: 2.89 GiB (18.5%)
Array-1: capacity: 16 GiB note: est. slots: 2 EC: None max module size: 8 GiB note: est.
Device-1: Bottom-Slot 1(top) size: 8 GiB speed: 1333 MT/s type: DDR3 detail: synchronous bus width: 64 bits
total: 64 bits manufacturer: Hynix/Hyundai part-no: HMT41GS6BFR8A-PB serial: 106B2ABD
Device-2: Bottom-Slot 2(under) size: 8 GiB speed: 1333 MT/s type: DDR3 detail: synchronous bus width: 64 bits
total: 64 bits manufacturer: 873E part-no: LIFETIMEMEMORY.COM serial: FFFFFFFF

At idle with KDE im at 906mb with conky running and with Brave running it jumps up to about 1.2-1.6Gb. This is with Htop. I rarely seem to get passed 2.3ish. 12Gb of ram for me.

Summary:

You have physically (and roughly) 16GB Ram installed ( 2 x 8 GB DDR3 )

That's also the max. total amount possible for that machine. (according to the output). Also the max. amount for each slot (8GB).

(Though this was not your original question for the thread)

Would making a dedicated swap partition (4G maybe) have a favorable impact?

Always thought it wouldn't make a difference, but who knows!

@Huckleberry Finn - correcto!

http://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/5802/55can4.png

danielson wrote: Wed Sep 23, 2020 3:09 pm Btw, is there a way to turn off "disk writes"?

What are you talking about, please? Also please provide your Quick System Info.

@JayM
Red line points to no. that fluctuates all the time (even if at zero at time of screenshot):
https://snipboard.io/rbcXgy.jpg

Sys info.:
https://justpaste.it/7hywb

- - - -

@Huckleberry Finn - guess my memory did not serve me well after all (embarrassed).

danielson wrote: Thu Sep 24, 2020 6:29 amguess my memory did not serve me well after all (embarrassed).

" C'est La Vie " :)

JayM wrote: Wed Sep 23, 2020 10:26 pm

danielson wrote: Wed Sep 23, 2020 3:09 pm Btw, is there a way to turn off "disk writes"?

What are you talking about, please?

viewtopic.php?f=145&t=60599#p599794 But Stevo suggested "Duck Duck Go" :)

Of course you're going to have a bit of disk access as long as the OS is running. There are various system processes running all the time even when you have no user-space apps running. Linux is updating system logs in /var/log. Caching is being done to /var/tmp and /var/cache. SMART is monitoring your disk's health. Various things are being done in the background all the time that require disk reads/writes.

@Huckleberry Finn - tu t'exprimes bien en français mon ami!

@JayM - sometimes i wonder if i'm not more bothered by MX KDE updating file content.
Something akin to what happens when i'm on Windows and its integrated search feature.
The cpu fan goes off regularly and htop doesn't indicate anything special.
Previous tries with Q4OS does not seem to have this issue as much.

My HP EliteBook is noisy by default and i really enjoy "the sound of silence".
LinuxMint XFCE (not MX version) and their MATE iterations have been the most silent thus far.
But they don't do file search as good as KDE.

As they say, you win some, you lose some.

DEFINITELY NOT! I've been using the KDE desktop since 2012, beginning with Mint 12 KDE. Since Mint dropped KDE support in 2016, I've tested a couple of dozen distros with the new Plasma 5 desktop and none have used over 500MB of memory on bootup. Usually, it's closer to 400MB. I regularly run a dozen productivity and multimedia apps and games simultaneously, using less than 2GBs of RAM. Many tests are showing that the Plasma desktop now uses less resources than XFCE.The only apps that that causes my system to use more than a total of 2GBs of RAM at any time are web browsers.

@ danielson: I see you have a lot of extensions in vivaldi, that will make some difference
I also see baloo_file in your processes (with 161 MiB), that may explain those disk writes. Did you mark "Enable File Search" in System Settings > Search > File Search ? You could disable that if you want less disk writes. Which program do you use to search for files? In my experience Catfish does a good job also on KDE, and doesn't need Baloo file indexing (but don't install the 1.4.10 version from the stable repo, it has some terrible bugs, use the MX Test version instead).

@tony37 - yes, have "enable file search" set.
Can always disable the content part of it to see if that makes a difference.
If i disable "file search" altogether, what are the options to find a file quickly without sucking up resources?

@gbowlds - i can see that Dropbox takes plenty of resources.
Vivaldi with all its extensions might have an impact too.
Have reduced these to 9 to see if that will do something to improve the experience as well.

Otherwise, only a fresh install could be the real test as to why MX KDE need 2.6G at loaded time.

danielson wrote: Thu Sep 24, 2020 2:30 pm @tony37 - yes, have "enable file search" set.
Can always disable the content part of it to see if that makes a difference.
If i disable "file search" altogether, what are the options to find a file quickly without sucking up resources?

Do you simply search for file name, or also for file content? Do you use Dolphin or KFind (or other)?

danielson wrote: Thu Sep 24, 2020 2:30 pm Otherwise, only a fresh install could be the real test as to why MX KDE need 2.6G at loaded time.

You could boot from live USB. Or simply close Vivaldi and Dropbox and see how much difference that makes.

@tony37 - just turning file content search off already seems to make a huge difference.
Can a hotkey be assigned to start/shut off again as needed?

Have always used Dolphin in KDE.
Was unaware of KFind.

As you're using Dolphin I suppose you don't often search on file content anyway. And I wouldn't be very surprised if totally turning off the file search won't make a real difference in search speed (you'd have to test).
One thing you should know about the Dolphin search function is that it doesn't show hidden files, or files in hidden folders, also when you say 'Show hidden files'. And in my experience KFind and Catfish are simply faster than Dolphin. But I understand it's easy to have the search function within the file manager (but you could add KFind and/or Catfish to the 'Open with' list for folders).
To search for file content I simply use grep in terminal.

@gbowlds - loading via usb as suggested by tony37 gives me 655Mb which is pretty decent.
843Mb when loading from laptop with no browser running yet.
1,216G with Vivaldi running with only 9 extensions as opposed to previous 18 or so.
Btw, welcome to MX forum!!

@tony37 - thank you for your other good tips which i will follow up on for sure!

" loading via usb as suggested by tony37 gives me 655Mb which is pretty decent."
That's still very high. My system uses only 436MB of RAM on bootup, which is about the same on every distro with Plasma 5 that I've ever tested.

Normal for me. With no apps loaded, other than system stuff, 2.7 GiB.

gbowlds wrote: Fri Oct 16, 2020 9:33 am " loading via usb as suggested by tony37 gives me 655Mb which is pretty decent."
That's still very high. My system uses only 436MB of RAM on bootup, which is about the same on every distro with Plasma 5 that I've ever tested.

As I said, it depends on where you look: viewtopic.php?p=599822#p599822

Quote, with a big smile:

Use your xxxxxxx RAM: The third change is caching everything, I don't care about your RAM, I will use even 8GB of your RAM if this provides me a faster way to find your files, unused RAM is wasted RAM, even truer the more time passes.
-> https://github.com/yatima1460/Drill

So everybody has his truth ;-)

Servus

Mine is just 1.1GB. Just Conky is disabled (and Firefox is open).

MX is very nice and lean and I prefer that even if my hardware could handle heavier loads.