On Sunday, December 02, 2012 00:55:11, Jack Chastain wrote: > Y'all probably know I recently put Ubuntu 12.04 on my aging Dell recently. > Happy over all, but there are a few small issues. > > I am limited by the hardware to 1G RAM. The System monitor shows I am using > roughly 80% (799M) when I start up and open my normal Chromium browser list > of about 7 tabs, and little else. > > My normal use is to leave this going for a while - and over time, I note my > memory use goes slowly up to nearly all available, and the system usually > then panics and reboots.
I think this is an artifact of Unity specifically. Sean Dague discussed this issue during the Desktop Shootout meeting. More specifically I remember that Unity is an extension of Compiz, and the "memory leak" issue is due to Compiz. > I did a little research on memory use under Ubuntu and mostly find older > posts. I am not sure if there is anything I can tune to reduce overall > memory use, but if anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear. As I suspect Unity is the issue, I'd recommend trying another Window Manager / Desktop Environment to test if this is the case. [This is safe to do; Unity will remain installed and will be available unless you expressly remove it.] For starters I'd specfically recommend Xfce4. Ubuntu by default comes with the "Ubuntu Software Center" -- within that type "xfce4" in the search field and install the packages "xfce4" and "xfce4-goodies". You can look through the other "xfce4-" packages for anything else you might want, but those two packages alone will be enough for a usable Xfce4 session. I tested this in an Ubuntu 12.04 test VM, the only snag was a window opened in the background /under/ the Ubutnu Software Center which was holding up the install while it asked a question whether to start a hard disk monitoring daemon at startup, to which I said "no". Once the install is done you can either log out or reboot. Next time you're at the X login screen, press the Ubuntu icon next to your username, and choose "Xfce session", and log in. Do everything else you would normally do -- use Chromium and whatnot -- and see if the RAM starts getting eaten up the same way or not. > Watching the resource list, chromium is consistently a large consumer so > maybe I just have to reduce expectations until I am finally able to get a > system I can put some real memory into. > > One basic question though - how do I edit the command line call for the > icon within the Unity tab-bar? I can edit an icon on the workspace, but > can't see how to get to it on the bar. I want to set the > --purge-memory-button flag. I'm able to get the terminal into the Ubuntu menu, but I'm not able to figure out how to do this either (yet). -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Dec 5 - SysAdmin Panel Jan 9 - High Performance Computing Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
