How many processes does everyone have?
 

I have 63 running right now according to top, I'm just wondering if that is alot. I'm thinking I might be wasting some memory and cpu process time. I know I shouldn't compare but my windows box has only 17 running right now.

68 here, with only Firefox and top in a console running. Of these, 67 are sleeping though.

79, but I have things like apache running in the background - only 2 are running at the minute. At university we have computer for logging into via ssh, its just like all the other department computers except its locked away so we can't physicall get at it and last time I logged on there there were 1100 (eleven hundred) processes :eek:

with gnome, 160+... with fluxbox about 45.

hm sounds like 70 is a norm, but 45? what's your secret? I'm thinking it's because you're running 9.1

Now I have 66 with: 2 consoles, irssi, amsn, boinc (seti@home) and FF, conky, gdeskelts and KBoincSPY (BOINC GUI).

If nothing is running I usually have 45-50

Icewm with Firefox and top= 48, 2 running, 46 sleeping.
Cpu 0.6%

65 processes, 2 running, 63 sleeping. Using KDE, xmms, firefox, amsn, couple of xterm's etc. opened.

A few of mine:

Laptop (Vector Linux 5.1 standard): 29 (fresh boot, idle at windowmaker 0.9.2)
Desktop (Slackware 10.2): 37 (right now, with Firefox 1.0.7 running, and windowmaker 0.9.2)

What really impresses me is that Linux can require so few threads to get a fully functional system up and running. For comparision, I recently checked with a few friends and their Windows XP boxes. I looked at the thread count (instead of their Task Manager process count), and most of the systems had 250-350 threads running. I think the fact that the System Idle process takes 2 threads sums up a lot about Windows XP :)

58 here, with firefox, ymessenger, kmail, a few terminals and gkrellm running on fluxbox...of the 58, 56 are sleeping, 2 running

Using fluxbox about 35-40 at start-up when idle. When in use it usually hovers at about 50.

That comparison with windows was interesting however I'm starting to feel that memory wise Linux is starting to bloat a bit. My average used memory is around 256mb but that can easily climb to 500mb when really multi-tasking.

I find the memory management of Linux to be very different than Windows, and so it is hard to adapt or not carry over Window-centric ideas. I remember when I first used top, I thought I was basically running out of RAM (when really it was all being effeciently cached, now I use free or gkrellm for the real value). I find that Linux may "use" RAM, and then not bother freeing it. I read a while back (while looking up about a potential memory leak in slocate) that the kernel doesn't free RAM unless there is a need for it.
I know that when I first boot in on my laptop, I'm using around 28-35mb of RAM, but it would soon say much more used (ie: less free) in gkrellm after I do a little work (maybe Firefox, a few terminals, jEdit). Even once the programs are closed, the RAM is still considered "used". However, I have all confidence that if I need that memory, the kernel will free it up, until then why bother?
I really find the approach that Linux takes of eventually caching as much RAM as possible very interesting in comparison to Windows, which tries to free all RAM after use. I know that even after 1 or 2 days of uptime 80-90% of my RAM would be cached.
Some of the apps may be getting a bit more RAM hungry, but so far I'm very very impressed with how little RAM it takes to get a running GUI and some real functionality happening.
Sorry if this post was rambling on a bit, it's getting late after many hours of programming :)

EDIT: As usual with Linux, there are tons of good resources on the memory management model. I'm personally gonna go read a few now to clear things up (and because I keep meaning too).

Can you show us what you have found on this topics?

Thanks.

68 processes here. 67 sleeping

About how much memory you are currently using do `free -m` the +/- buffers/cache line tells you how much ram is being used as seen by the applications.