Memory Usage

Memory Usage

[Rodger Fox]

What is the typical memory usage of a GuixSD system?
I can't seem to get mine below 5GiB, according to top.
This is when I stop Xorg and most system services, including networking 
and such, and just log in to a plain terminal with nothing but top 
running. Is this normal?
The numbers listed per process in top don't even add up to that, but it 
reports the total being high. Also, icecat uses a 1000m and 
gnome-terminal uses 500m.
This seems wrong to me, but I'm not sure. In my session right now it is 
reporting over 14GiB of memory use. I don't know why it should be so 
high.

-Rodger

Re: Memory Usage

[ng0]

On 17-02-22 11:37:11, Rodger Fox wrote:
> What is the typical memory usage of a GuixSD system?

There's no such thing as a typical system. It depends on what you run,
300 open browser tabs will lead to more RAM used for example.

I'm watching a video, write in an IRC client, and run some other
background applications and I'm at 3.5 GiB RAM.

> I can't seem to get mine below 5GiB, according to top.
> This is when I stop Xorg and most system services, including networking and
> such, and just log in to a plain terminal with nothing but top running. Is
> this normal?
> The numbers listed per process in top don't even add up to that, but it
> reports the total being high. Also, icecat uses a 1000m and gnome-terminal
> uses 500m.
> This seems wrong to me, but I'm not sure. In my session right now it is
> reporting over 14GiB of memory use. I don't know why it should be so high.
> 
> -Rodger
> 

Re: Memory Usage

[Rodger Fox]

On 2017-02-22 11:51 am, ng0 wrote:
> On 17-02-22 11:37:11, Rodger Fox wrote:
>> What is the typical memory usage of a GuixSD system?
> 
> There's no such thing as a typical system. It depends on what you run,
> 300 open browser tabs will lead to more RAM used for example.

I understand. I didn't mean to leave that as the whole of my question.
I elaborated more on my situation. I have stopped Xorg, networking,
and the guix daemon. I was still at over 5GiB.

> I'm watching a video, write in an IRC client, and run some other
> background applications and I'm at 3.5 GiB RAM.

So that seems to confirm my suspicion that something is wrong with my 
system.
I am way over that mark with basically nothing running.
As well, I checked another system I have that runs Arch Linux and I 
found that
with full gnome-desktop and several extra services running, it is around 
4GiB.

I was wondering if it was just something strange about the Guix 
binaries.
Anyway, I'm just looking for ideas. I know it's a pretty vague problem.
It just makes me wonder if my system is compromised somehow.

I think I will try a fresh install to see if it changes anything.

>> I can't seem to get mine below 5GiB, according to top.
>> This is when I stop Xorg and most system services, including 
>> networking and
>> such, and just log in to a plain terminal with nothing but top 
>> running. Is
>> this normal?
>> The numbers listed per process in top don't even add up to that, but 
>> it
>> reports the total being high. Also, icecat uses a 1000m and 
>> gnome-terminal
>> uses 500m.
>> This seems wrong to me, but I'm not sure. In my session right now it 
>> is
>> reporting over 14GiB of memory use. I don't know why it should be so 
>> high.
>> 
>> -Rodger
>> 

Re: Memory Usage

[Tomáš Čech]

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On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 12:28:41PM -0800, Rodger Fox wrote:
>On 2017-02-22 11:51 am, ng0 wrote:
>>On 17-02-22 11:37:11, Rodger Fox wrote:
>>>What is the typical memory usage of a GuixSD system?
>>
>>There's no such thing as a typical system. It depends on what you run,
>>300 open browser tabs will lead to more RAM used for example.
>
>I understand. I didn't mean to leave that as the whole of my question.
>I elaborated more on my situation. I have stopped Xorg, networking,
>and the guix daemon. I was still at over 5GiB.
>
>>I'm watching a video, write in an IRC client, and run some other
>>background applications and I'm at 3.5 GiB RAM.
>
>So that seems to confirm my suspicion that something is wrong with my 
>system.
>I am way over that mark with basically nothing running.
>As well, I checked another system I have that runs Arch Linux and I 
>found that
>with full gnome-desktop and several extra services running, it is 
>around 4GiB.
>
>I was wondering if it was just something strange about the Guix 
>binaries.
>Anyway, I'm just looking for ideas. I know it's a pretty vague problem.
>It just makes me wonder if my system is compromised somehow.
>
>I think I will try a fresh install to see if it changes anything.

This is rather high - are you sure that you don't count cache into
this?

What is in /proc/meminfo?

Best regards,

S_W

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Re: Memory Usage

[Leo Famulari]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 07:51:24PM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> On 17-02-22 11:37:11, Rodger Fox wrote:
> > What is the typical memory usage of a GuixSD system?
> 
> There's no such thing as a typical system. It depends on what you run,
> 300 open browser tabs will lead to more RAM used for example.
> 
> I'm watching a video, write in an IRC client, and run some other
> background applications and I'm at 3.5 GiB RAM.

I have a headless system with 3 GiB RAM total. I'm currently compiling
the Linux kernel and GCC, and ~900 MiB are actively being used by
userspace processes, with the remainder filled with assorted buffers and
cache.

Re: Memory Usage

[Maxim Cournoyer]

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Hi Rodger!

Rodger Fox <thylakoid@openmailbox.org> writes:

> What is the typical memory usage of a GuixSD system?
> I can't seem to get mine below 5GiB, according to top.

Ugh. This with a full blown Gnome desktop?

> This is when I stop Xorg and most system services, including
> networking and such, and just log in to a plain terminal with nothing
> but top running. Is this normal?

It doesn't sound normal to me. I'd expect Gnome to boot with about 1 GiB
RAM usage.

> The numbers listed per process in top don't even add up to that, but
> it reports the total being high. Also, icecat uses a 1000m and
> gnome-terminal uses 500m.

Depends how many tabs you have opened but yes, IceCat/Firefox/Any
browser are very memory hungry.

> This seems wrong to me, but I'm not sure. In my session right now it
> is reporting over 14GiB of memory use. I don't know why it should be
> so high.
>

Using the minimal desktop environment (ratpoison) with GuixSD I'm
booting with RAM usage of about 100 MiB.

Maxim

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Re: Memory Usage

[pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)]

On 02/24/2017 09:08 AM, Maxim Cournoyer wrote:
> Hi Rodger!
> 
> Rodger Fox <thylakoid@openmailbox.org> writes:
> 
>> What is the typical memory usage of a GuixSD system?
>> I can't seem to get mine below 5GiB, according to top.
> 
> Ugh. This with a full blown Gnome desktop?
> 
>> This is when I stop Xorg and most system services, including
>> networking and such, and just log in to a plain terminal with nothing
>> but top running. Is this normal?
> 
> It doesn't sound normal to me. I'd expect Gnome to boot with about 1 GiB
> RAM usage.
> 
>> The numbers listed per process in top don't even add up to that, but
>> it reports the total being high. Also, icecat uses a 1000m and
>> gnome-terminal uses 500m.
> 
> Depends how many tabs you have opened but yes, IceCat/Firefox/Any
> browser are very memory hungry.
> 
>> This seems wrong to me, but I'm not sure. In my session right now it
>> is reporting over 14GiB of memory use. I don't know why it should be
>> so high.
>>
> 
> Using the minimal desktop environment (ratpoison) with GuixSD I'm
> booting with RAM usage of about 100 MiB.
> 
> Maxim
> 

Full-blown GNOME Desktop shows in GNOME System Monitor as consuming <390
MiB of RAM. Opening the arstechica.com Web site in netsurf-gtk makes for
a total of <490 MiB.

Note that top can distinguish between „readily reclaimable“ memory and
memory that is not „readily reclaimable“, which AFAIK is what is
actually important. See the top man page.

Regards,
Florian

Re: Memory Usage

[Rodger Fox]

Thanks for the feedback on this. I think it was just my mistake.
This is what I was looking at: GiB Mem : 16.6/2.929
After using 'free', which gives more reasonable output, I think top is
reporting a percentage. I never realized that, and it seems unintuitive,
given the units it displays, but this is not a Guix issue, just my own
mistake in what I was reading.

Re: Memory Usage

[Maxim Cournoyer]

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Hello Rodger,

Rodger Fox <thylakoid@openmailbox.org> writes:

> Thanks for the feedback on this. I think it was just my mistake.
> This is what I was looking at: GiB Mem : 16.6/2.929
> After using 'free', which gives more reasonable output, I think top is
> reporting a percentage. I never realized that, and it seems unintuitive,
> given the units it displays, but this is not a Guix issue, just my own
> mistake in what I was reading.

I think it is only unintuitive because this was changed in a recent
version of top. You can press 'm' twice to display the memory values
instead of percentage, or '?' to learn about the different toggles.

Maxim

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