are the consoles already taking up system memory?
 

The login consoles accessible with alt-ctrl-F#, are they already taking up space in ram? In other words, if faced with a choice between opening a term in Gnome or KDE or just logging into one of these consoles and running a command line program (eg wget, ssh, etc) does it make more sense to use the consoles since they are already there?

Thanks,

That's an interesting question. Have you tried measuring for yourself the effect of both using top? I would sure love to hear the results.

Yes I believe they do.i usually get rid of these and leave two in case I need them.i never really need more than 1 before.

It is very few memory and I believe the Gnome and KDE's programs take more memory, but that's insignifiant.

Although the virtual consoles take up some RAM, it isn't like a console emulator (ie: gnome-terminal) takes up tons either. Just open one up if you are already in Gnome, that's more convient and easy, and the RAM difference won't be noticeable (rxvt and xterm take around 1mb / instance).

ok. Thanks for the replies.