kde questions

[kdeputer]

So, I installed Kubuntu and most of the time, things are okay but I have some problems with it.

I have a lot of tabs open and some apps running and then the system bogs down. Sometimes, I have the message, '....... terminate the application...' whatever it is. Firefox version installed is ver. 17.

Can anyone comment on this? Is this usual/normal? I used XFCE with Debian before and I don't remember ever having it 'crash' or freeze up (i.e. the XFCE desktop) as often. Not nearly. Some nuances annoyed me and I liked the extra options with KDE. So, I went back to a KDE distro and chose Kubuntu.

The same thing happened with Debian 'Testing' and a Debian-sid distro using KDE. I switched to using XFCE and it was not as often.

I am just wondering if too much memory gets used up when using KDE since I often don't do anything different when using the 'other' DE. I tested Unity/Ubuntu and although I might not have had as many tabs open, I had quite a few and tried to use a few applications/progams as well. But, it didn't crash. That was with the Live CD, though.

Well, sorry to ramble on but I can't be the only one who tries to multi-task and has tons of tabs and programs running.

Help?!? I ran MEMTEST and opened a terminal console and ran htop and top and other utilities that displayed the resources used (i.e. hardware etc.) but I saw nothing that jumped out at me. I think RAM and CPU became high at times. I'd have to run them again to recall.

So, any advice? No, upgrading my computer is not an option right now. The hardware is P45 motherboard, 4GB of DDR2 RAM (brand name) and Q6600 quad-core cpu. So, it's not the greatest but it should handle most of the workload? But, maybe running a lot of apps and having multiple tabs open just impacts the memory too much? I just thought there seemed to be a difference when using KDE compared to xfce. I haven't tried the same test with Gnome but it's so hideous, I'm not sure I could be convinced to. Hahaha////// j/k

Well, what do you advise? Help? :-/

[NickStone]

Am I right to assume your running apps from within Firefox? Without knowing exactly what is running on your system I am tempted to suggest that it is one or more of your Firefox apps that is causing the problem. I don't know how many of these apps you are running, but do you need them all to run at the same time? Have you tried to identify the "rogue" app? Run each app on its own and see which one is causing the problem. It maybe a conflict between that Firefox app and something within KDE that doesn't affect XFCE. You will need to act like Sherlock Holmes to identify which of the apps is not performing as it should.

Hope this helps.

[james147]

Firstly what is the output of

free -m

Next I suggest you monitor your memory usage as you start new applications the system monitor can do this. This should allow you to identify what is taking up so much memory. Web browsers tend to be quite heavy and can take up several gigs with you have lots of tabs open.

[Snowhog]

I have a lot of tabs open and some apps running

What constitutes a lot (tabs)? Exactly how many do you keep open?
"and some" apps. Exactly how many and which ones?

[jlittle]

...The hardware is P45 motherboard, 4GB of DDR2 RAM (brand name) and Q6600 quad-core cpu...

IME that's 2 GiB more than you need for kubuntu, unless you're editing huge images or movies.
Firefox can map a lot of memory during the start of a new tab, for me it was about 350 MiB per tab in Google groups. I'd middle click a bunch of posts, the system would struggle, and by the time I'd get monitoring tools running the tabs would have completed their startup and have reduced their memory footprint and the tools would show nothing in particular.
Some desktop effects can cause trouble, so try turning them off, alt+shift+f12 is one way. The Blur effect, on by default, kills my main system, which is about 7 years old now.

Regards, John Little

[kdeputer]

Sorry to bump this but I have a new question. This is the info I can present:

-m
total used free shared buffers cached
3954 3407 546 0 54 457
-/+ buffers/cache: 2894 1059
Swap: 8259 1494 6765

For Firefox:
CPU – 20% Memory: 1,691, 452 K (memory is fluctuating up and down but is going as high as 1,7x, xxx K

How would you interpret that? Firefox is slowing down my system (when I have many tabs open)?

The only other apps running are libreoffice and skype (Dolphin, Konsole and System Monitor were also started later but the cpu/mem. usage is neglible - skype is the only one to get to 1% of memory).

[jlittle]

The fact that swap is showing anything used (1494) implies you've had an excursion into swapping, but that was past when you ran free, because it shows 1059 MiB free. If your problems were similar to mine, firefox used a lot of memory, but then released it. You've mentioned "many" tabs, how many is "many"? Anyway, for me numbers of tabs wasn't the problem, as I could have dozens of KFN tabs open without trouble, but what was in them.

If your problems are similar to mine, you won't see them in monitoring tools unless you start them before you run short of memory, and if they don't need much memory to run. I ran "top" in a konsole.

I've now got 4 GiB of RAM now, 3.7 after the graphics chip has taken its lot, and I only go into swap If I play silly buggers with memory, like editing multi GB text files.

Regards, John Little