Is it just me or is everyone experiencing heavy RAM usage in this release? I just installed it on my desktop and just idling it is using 1.4 GB. That's after I turned off unnecessary services and programs.

found this but i'm not sure if it is what you are looking for

Sorry, I don't have the links around, but I remember there were some reports of a bug causing extreme memory usage. I think there was a memory leak somewhere in the X11 (or Gnome) environment, so server installations shouldn't experience that problem.

But I haven't seen anything like this on my systems (one desktop and three notebooks, a mixture of 64 and 32 bit systems).

Did you update Your system? I like to do the following sequence:

Don't ask me about why I call "apt-get update" twice... somehow it makes me feel better... ;-)

I use:

the only issue I have had with 64bit was the boot screen resolution after installing Nvidia drivers, but this was quickly solved searching web. I do have poor battery life compared to Win7 though.

As suggested above install all updates and report back, will be interesting to see what happens.

at ilde time my ram usage is 400Mb !
on kubuntu it was 370 Mb

No updates, it was a fresh 10.04 installation.
Hmm, withonly Firefox running my ram usage is 1.23 GB. Xorg and Firefox are taking up 15% of my 2gb of ram . Thanks for those commands, I'll see what happens with them.

Update: I ran the commands that Dev suggested but there is no change in RAM usage.

Updates are essential... I didn't count them, but since the 10.04 release there were already a lot of updates.

After reading Your last post, what is Your memory issue: that Your "basic load" is high or that memory consumption is increasing over time, even when all applications are closed?

Firefox and Chrome can eat much memory, but most of it (e.g. all) should be released when they are closed. Also OpenOffice and Eclipse (and other IDEs as well) can consume very large amounts of memory.

Also what Window Manager and visual effects are You using? Maybe change Your settings to a not enhanced desktop environment, reboot and check memory usage.

Actually I never had a closer look at memory usage running desktop installations... ;-)

You really got me interested in the numbers of free... so I googled to get more information about free and found the following information: Memory Management.

So basically the "buffers" and "cached" column can be ignored ("shared" should always be zero). So the only interesting column is the "-/+ buffers/cache" line.

I did some free statements on my 64 Bit 10.04 Desktop:

1) System started, console login, and "sudo stop gdm"

2) Starting gdm again (still using console)

3) Logging out and switching to the graphical log; after login just starting a terminal. I have many compiz effects enabled.

4) Used another User, without any extreme UI effects, basically default-fresh Ubuntu login


So my system uses between 271408 and 528544 kilobytes ... that's about ~265 MB to ~516 MB. IMHO not too bad. I don't have a pre 10.04 system around, so I can't compare those numbers.

My system idles at 1.4gb after all the updates. Idk, I'm thinking of not worrying with it and just ordering some more ddr2 ram before the prices skyrocket. I was appalled that the ram usage was that high on a fresh and fully updated build. the 32-bit 10.04 doesn't idle at anything near that ~300 mb to 500 mb.

Sorry to revive an oldish thread, just wanted to comment on the battery usage issue.

[edit] I just moved most of my post to another thread as really it was off topic here and fitted much better over there.

Cheers