Hello!

I'm still pretty new to Linux and was just wondering if anyone could point me at good ways of saving on the massive amount of memory KDE seems to consume.

I find it really hard to believe things like 'artsd' need 11 instances, all consuming what I believe is 60mb of RAM... ??

I have a gig of RAM and it's getting eaten alive by music players and firefox tabs, basically. I've tried using Amorak instead and that was much the same. XMMS crashes regularly.

I also have about 6 tabs open in firefox and each are currently consuming 104mb of RAM, according to the process manager!

What do they need all this RAM for?

Thanks in advance for any advice / wisdom people can provide.

edit - just found a FAQ that suggests this is quite normal due to the way memory is managed, but I am definitely noticing a slow down when it reaches capacity...

Also, I probably should have put this in the newbie forum, sorry.

I'm still relatively new to Linux as well, but as far as I know this is normal. Linux distributes all the available memory to all the applications that are running. This means an application will probably get more memory space allocated than it needs. There's no need to worry since you seem to have more than enough (1GB) memory.

One of the advantages of Linux is that all the processes on your system compete with each other for cpu time and memory. So when and if a process needs more cpu time and memory, the kernel should give it to them if it's not being used by something else.

That being said, although you have plenty of memory, you could be experiencing a slow down because your processor may not be a fast one. I have over a gig of RAM but my processor is only 933 MHz so some things don't work as quickly for me as they do on other computers. Funny though, I never come close to using half the amount of RAM on my computer.

If you want a speedier system, get away from Gnome or KDE and use a different windows manager / destkop environment. Try Xfce or any of the others available.

Ahh right, I get it, thanks!

Not convinced what's making it slow down, but I'll keep an eye on that. I would have thought the two processors I have could keep up, but I guess it could be down to a configuration issue or something else.

Cheers!