Ubuntu needs more bloat...

[chessnerd]

Everyone knows that Vista is very bloated compared to Ubuntu, but I never realized it was this lightweight until I did a quick experiment...

Just to see what would happen, I opened up every single application in my "Applications" menu and the screenshot shows what I got resource wise.

Now, Vista usually idles at about 1.3GB of RAM and 3-4% CPU. The CPU idling is way more, but, then again, it is working to keep dozens of windows open (as you can see in the taskbar). Also, everything still moves just as fast. There is no noticeable lag even with everything running at once!

Now, to be fair, I don't have advanced desktop settings (I might add that later) and I didn't open anything from "System" except for the System Monitor, but even then I doubt I would breach 1.2GB, which would still be less RAM than Vista.

We better bloat Ubuntu up a bit. If it can run this many applications without my RAM even starting to run out, there is a problem. I would be long out of RAM in Vista if I tried to run everything at once, but Ubuntu is taking this in stride. It just isn't natural!

Think of the future. Imagine running something like this on a computer with 16GB of RAM or 32GB. At this rate, Ubuntu would still only take up 2-3 GB by then, maybe less. All that RAM would just go to waste. This computer has one stick of 2GB RAM and one of 1GB. That poor 1GB stick probably doesn't even have anything on it right now. It must feel so left out...

[aaaantoine]

You, sir, are quite funny.

There's a better way to eat up RAM.

1. Open up Firefox.
2. Open up every website on the Internet in a new tab.

[hoppipolla]

You, sir, are quite funny.

There's a better way to eat up RAM.

1. Open up Firefox.
2. Open up every website on the Internet in a new tab.

I would support this initiative O.O

lol

[Eisenwinter]

You, sir, are quite funny.

There's a better way to eat up RAM.

1. Open up Firefox.
2. Open up every website on the Internet in a new tab.
:lolflag:

That is true!

[-grubby]

Now, Vista usually idles at about 1.3GB of RAM


It's called cache.

Right now, Kubuntu is using 4.7 GB of my RAM. Technically speaking, 3.1 GB of that is cache.

[chessnerd]

It's called cache.

Right now, Kubuntu is using 4.7 GB of my RAM. Technically speaking, 3.1 GB of that is cache.

What do you have running that requires 1.6 GB of RAM and in cache that requires 3.1 GB?

[pelle.k]

Haha, people doing "scientific" benchmarks using gnome system monitor, and glxgears - it never ceases to amaze me. Dont take this personally chessnerd ;)
Until ars technica does an in depth comparison i don't usually belive anything i hear.

[chessnerd]

Haha, people doing "scientific" benchmarks using gnome system monitor, and glxgears - they never stop surprising me. Dont take this personally chessnerd ;)
Until ars technica does an in depth comparison i don't usually belive anything i hear.

I wouldn't expect to find this experiment in Linux Monthly (does that exist?) or anything. It wasn't meant to be scientific or a benchmark or even really a comparison, it was more of a: I wonder what would happen if I ran everything at one time... and I just put a conclusion to it. This was more of a joke (as you can tell by the title).

Currently, after everything was closed, my system is running at 435MB with only Opera running and 38% of my RAM is being used as cache (probably because I ran all of those programs...). I could immediately point out that Windows runs way higher than that with only Opera, but I understand that it isn't fair to compare. The System Monitor and Task Manager are not the same thing, don't work the same way, and, therefore, cannot be used to benchmark accurately. I don't take it personally. :)

[Marlonsm]

While it's not a scientific benckmark it shows that Ubuntu manages memory well.

What you could do is to open the same applications on both OSs, one I can think of right now is Blender, it is memory-intensive and there are versions both for Windows and for Linux.

Right now Ubuntu is using 490Mb of my 2Gb RAM, I'm running only FF 3.5 with Compiz, AWN and Conky in the background.

[blur xc]

You, sir, are quite funny.

There's a better way to eat up RAM.

1. Open up Firefox.
2. Open up every website on the Internet in a new tab.


so funny- last night I noticed my compiz effects were all slow and choppy. Later, I realized my wife had 4 or 5 Firefox windows open, each with 4 or 5 tabs open, most of them with flash content. yay.

BM

[pelle.k]

This was more of a joke (as you can tell by the title).
Yes, i get it. And it was a fun experiment nevertheless. :)

Some apps don't initially eat much memory, until you start to actually using them. Take nautilus for example, it's caches thumbnails pretty aggressively once you open up some folders with such content. And firefox can be pretty intensive as well, both on RAM and the CPU naturally. Just opening firefox doesn't do much. javascript + flash anyone?

[MarcusW]

Yes, i get it. And it was a fun experiment nevertheless. :)

Some apps don't initially eat much memory, until you start to actually using them. Take nautilus for example, it's caches thumbnails pretty aggressively once you open up some folders with such content. And firefox can be pretty intensive as well, both on RAM and the CPU naturally. Just opening firefox doesn't do much. javascript + flash anyone?

So true. I remember once having a nautilus tab opened with 5 movies that were downloading. Nautilus was using up like 30-50% cpu trying to create thumbnails (it failed). :P

[benj1]

i dont think youre being ambitious enough, sure you can get memory usage upto what vista uses, but thats only by openning a load of extra apps, but thats cheating vista does it all by itself.
perhaps something like an extremely resource intensive random blue screen generator? if we make it a 5gb binary we could perhaps get hard drive usage on a par with vista aswell, without relying on extra apps such as office suite, archive managers etc, or a comprehensive list of drivers.

[MarcusW]

i dont think youre being ambitious enough, sure you can get memory usage upto what vista uses, but thats only by openning a load of extra apps, but thats cheating vista does it all by itself.
perhaps something like an extremely resource intensive random blue screen generator? if we make it a 5gb binary we could perhaps get hard drive usage on a par with vista aswell, without relying on extra apps such as office suite, archive managers etc, or a comprehensive list of drivers.

I remember clearly from my time using vista that it freed memory whenever I started a memory intensive operation. I don't see the fact that the OS is using lots of ram as a problem. (I bought my ram for it to be used)The fact that it's slow however I didn't like. :D

[Marlonsm]

Another one:
Running all six Star Wars movies at once (smoothly) with transparency, Compiz and FireFox in the background, 800 Mb of RAM used, 35-40% CPU (and an overloaded DVD reader).

[juancarlospaco]

Don't worry, Mono is helping there, making +5 times Slower applications.
random example: SQLite ported to Mono is 6 times Slower...
:)

[hoppipolla]

Haha and I didn't fully appreciate the image of every single app running - that is genius lol :)

[PhoHammer]

Now, Vista usually idles at about 1.3GB of RAM and 3-4% CPU. The CPU idling is way more, but, then again, it is working to keep dozens of windows open (as you can see in the taskbar). Also, everything still moves just as fast. There is no noticeable lag even with everything running at once!



That's hott...

[hyperAura]

can any1 post also a comparison with a mac? cause i heard that mac's hav also good memory management but i do not own one to do the test it on my own.. :)

[scragar]

I know an even faster way to consume all the ram on your system:
`yes`1. Type that exactly as it appears.
2. Scream in fustration when you realise it doesn't stop with ctrl+C
3. Scream even louder when it's ram requirement rises to several GB in only a few seconds.
4. Reboot to save the hassle of finding the exact shell the command is running in.

[juancarlospaco]

I know an even faster way to consume all the ram on your system:
`yes`1. Type that exactly as it appears.
2. Scream in fustration when you realise it doesn't stop with ctrl+C
3. Scream even louder when it's ram requirement rises to several GB in only a few seconds.
4. Reboot to save the hassle of finding the exact shell the command is running in.

Don't Work on Karmic ATM :)

ctrl+C stop it, top, killall and such too

[scragar]

Don't Work on Karmic ATM :)

ctrl+C stop it, top, killall and such too

Really? That's cool. I tried it on arch linux a little while ago, ctrl+c just returned me to my terminal, it didn't kill it. I was rather annoyed at that.

It also doesn't use much CPU power, just I/O and ram. I'm sure the system monitor would show it, but then the question is can you launch the system monitor before it's too late :p

killall would be great, if you don't have any bash scripts running, if you do you have to start questioning how they were launched and if killall bash is really a good idea, or if you should guess in the 30 seconds or so you've got before 4GB of ram is completely consumed :p

[doorknob60]

I know an even faster way to consume all the ram on your system:
`yes`1. Type that exactly as it appears.
2. Scream in fustration when you realise it doesn't stop with ctrl+C
3. Scream even louder when it's ram requirement rises to several GB in only a few seconds.
4. Reboot to save the hassle of finding the exact shell the command is running in.

Nice, annoying :lolflag: Except on my box it used 50% CPU and the RAM usage didn't go above 20% (a lot still considering I have 4 GB. I let it run for a good 30-60 seconds too), but my system was still very responsive, and besides Konsole refusing to open, I was easily able to open htop in xterm and find the culprit (after killall yes didn't work), killall -9 zsh did the job. I'm too curious, I knew it was a bad idea to type it in, but I did anyways :P Oh well, no harm done.

[scragar]

Nice, annoying :lolflag: Except on my box it used 50% CPU and the RAM usage didn't go above 20% (a lot still considering I have 4 GB. I let it run for a good 30-60 seconds too), but my system was still very responsive, and besides Konsole refusing to open, I was easily able to open htop in xterm and find the culprit (after killall yes didn't work), killall -9 zsh did the job. I'm too curious, I knew it was a bad idea to type it in, but I did anyways :P Oh well, no harm done.

Then why did it cripple my system?

Wait, I was running bash, you're running zsh. That has to be it, right? My computer was rendered useless in about 2 minutes, I was forced to use a tty to just kill off random bash processes and hope I didn't break anything. Luckily I got it in my second try.

[directhex]

Don't worry, Mono is helping there, making +5 times Slower applications.
random example: SQLite ported to Mono is 6 times Slower...
:)

No Mono app uses csharp-sqlite (they use regular C SQLite)

And csharp-sqlite's performance is being worked on - it currently stands at between 2.7x the time taken for SQLite for some tasks, and 1.0x (i.e. no slowdown)

[hoppipolla]

I know an even faster way to consume all the ram on your system:
`yes`1. Type that exactly as it appears.
2. Scream in fustration when you realise it doesn't stop with ctrl+C
3. Scream even louder when it's ram requirement rises to several GB in only a few seconds.
4. Reboot to save the hassle of finding the exact shell the command is running in.

I tried it too! I was just watching my RAM use go up until I Ctrl+C'd it to kill it :)

Luckily, I was running it in the Gnome Terminal so it actually killed the whole shell!

So why does it do it? The "yes" command apparently just outputs a single string repetitively (lots of the letter "y"), but what does the ` before and after do?

That's very clever... I'm glad it doesn't work in Karmic...

[scragar]

I tried it too! I was just watching my RAM use go up until I Ctrl+C'd it to kill it :)

Luckily, I was running it in the Gnome Terminal so it actually killed the whole shell!

So why does it do it? The "yes" command apparently just outputs a single string repetitively (lots of the letter "y"), but what does the ` before and after do?

That's very clever... I'm glad it doesn't work in Karmic...

Well `` creates a subshell and logs the output till the command in it exits, at which point it's returned, normally you'd use it for something like:
echo "today is the `date`"For something that exits pretty quickly, but of course yes doesn't exit on it's own and outputs and endless supply of text(which is stored in ram). :p

I guess I should stop using xterm and bash then, looks like avoiding either would have prevented my problem after running it.