14.04 eats RAM

[RickPJ]

Has no-one else found that 14.04 uses a huge amount more RAM than 13.10?

I mostly use an Asus Eee 901 netbook upgraded to 2GB RAM and a 64GB SSD. While not lighting fast this has been very serviceable up to 13.10, including various other distros prior to my deciding to stick to Kubuntu.

After upgrading to 14.04 the performance has been almost unusable, with endless lags, usually waiting on disk IO. The system monitor shows at least 70% RAM used most of the time, and always some swap space in use. So it's basically out of RAM, and getting bogged down messing with swapping. I've tried setting vm_swappiness down to 1, and played with some other parameters, but doesn't make much difference.

I decided to revert to my saved image of 13.10 in case it was a co-incidental hardware problem, but no - the old image performed as before, and typical RAM usage is around 40-50%, where 14.04 is 70-80%.

I also use Kubuntu on a desktop with 4GB RAM, and 14.04 shows typical usage of around 55% - i.e. it's using over 2GB, so my netbook doesn't stand much chance!

My typical usage is Thunderbird and Chrome permanently open, with 4-5 tabs in Chrome. I don't think this is excessive, and seeing it's OK in 13.10 then it's not very good that 14.10 can't handle it. I've stopped baloo from scanning my home directory, having read that it's a potential hog, and it doesn't now show up in the process list.

I thought I'd got away from the issue of Windows needing at least 4GB to even run, but looks like (k)ubuntu is going the same way. Is no-one else using machines of 2GB or less?

All comments and advice welcome!

Thanks, Rick

[GreyGeek]

My wife's Acer Aspire 0D521 netbook has 2GB of RAM and runs trusty just fine.

[RickPJ]

My wife's Acer Aspire 0D521 netbook has 2GB of RAM and runs trusty just fine.

Hmmm, could you tell me what her typical application mix is, and what % RAM the system load reports?

TIA
Rick

[GreyGeek]

With the app she uses most, FireFox (and she does her email via gmail) and watching the RAM with KSysmonitor, the D521 uses 0.42GiB of 1.7GiB of RAM, and it stays flat. With FF in idle the CPU runs at 20%. When I open serveral tabs the memory usage rose to 0.69GiB (max) and then slowly declined to 0.42GiB. When I close FF the memory dropped to 0.35GiB and stayed there. There is no swap file. CPU usage during the FF run oscillated wildly between 20% and 100% but FF never seemed sluggish. When I run it, on occasions, I use Dolphin, the Konsole, KWrite, Gwenview and Okcular. I don't recall the RAM usage ever rising above 1.2GiB or there abouts.