Hello, I’ve been using KDE Plasma 6 for a while and the ram usage is really absurd.
Applications like Discord and Spotify can go up over 700mb of ram usage.
I’ve been reading some articles and some people say that Plasma 6’s ram usage is comparable to xfce, which I’ve tested on my own and clearly xfce consumes so much less ram on every application. I also get the screen frozen for moments.
My laptop cpu and gpu are: Intel i5-12450H and rtx 3050.
May It be this ram usage is due to the components or something else?
A few things:
- If you are really using plasma 5 you need to update your system more often because plasma 6 has been out for some time.
- Your DE shouldn’t have a significant impact on how much RAM applications use. When people compare RAM usage of various DEs, they are comparing how much RAM the DE itself uses.
- I suspect the difference you are seeing is do to some other factor. Without understanding your testing setup and methodology, it is hard to say what that may be.
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Thanks for respond.
I actually have plasma 6, my bad.
I’ve checked that the GPU isn’t being used and the current graphics are “Mesa Intel Graphics”.
Maybe aren’t these graphics well optimized for the DE? I also did the installation offline.
I’ll try then install the Nvidia drivers and see what happens. Thanks
the screen freezing thing is likely a kde issue, if i were to guess, you are using kde on wayland and you have an nvidia, this is known to be a bad combination, try switching it to x11 (you should be able to do this on the login screen) see if it behaves better.
KDE is known to be a bit crash happy though so this unfortunately isn’t that unusual of an issue, i used kde for like 2 years recently and the reason i stopped using it was exactly this.
Edit: Nvm you’re on a laptop and using ur intel igpu, ur nvidia drivers are likely already installed (try prime-run glxgears) wayland on nvidia is not the cause of ur issue then (in my experience nvidia and wayland don’t mix BUT if you only enable the nvidia gpu for specific applications on a case by case basis it’s perfectly fine), but wayland could still be part of the problem so try it anyways.
So you are saying the same applications on two different desktop environments uses different amounts of memory? That is hella weird because I don’t know of any desktop environment that allocates memory for applications. That is the kernel’s job.
Hi, I’m currently using x11 and also when I run prime-run glxgears, the command isn’t found.
Yes, Brave, Discord, etc use more ram on try DE than in xfce and Gnome also.
Do you measure it with the same monitor program in all of these. Because if you just read a Memory column that can be calculated in various ways.
Yes, I did
Sounds interesting, do you have an example ala application x measured with y takes that amount in gnome and this in plasma?
As I said, Discord, Brave, Spotify, Pycharm (this one may not be optimized for Linux as well) and even the system manager uses more ram here than in xfce or Gnome
How are you measuring it though and at what point?
Memory usage will typically increase with time and usage. Are you measuring them all from a clean boot? What is your methodology?
For the fun I spun up two VMs. First picture is Spotify, second one is Discord (no login, no usage, which of course would change things considerably). Looks virtually the same.
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I don’t know if It’s the correct methodology. However, I’ve been restarting my laptop and right then opening some pages on the browser and the apps mentioned.
If prime-run isn’t found it’s likely your nvidia drivers are not installed.
Updates here: I’ve have not installed the Nvidia Drivers yet, but I seems to be good right now.
Now the apps consume “right” ram, kinda rare tbh.
And what did you do that all of a sudden it changed? 
Well, Right now many DE’s are dealing with Wayland integration, and everything related in context to different devices and the technologies they use… So to say “KDE Plasma is acting strange…” (same with any DE) is often not the case, and people tend to blame the OS, DE, Wayland… and then think that switching to another DE is a solution, but in reality you are most likely to trade a bunch of bad stuff for a bunch of other bad stuff!
Well, here’s some good news:
Plasma 6.1 beta just got released for testing, and thanks to the MIR guy, now working for NVIDIA, a few changes to the kernel, MESA and what not are coming, and expected to fix a lot of problems all at once for everything on Wayland AND some on X-windows too, for mainly NVIDEA, but also AMD and Intel GPU’s! 
Then the KDE team (and others) have found many solutions in how they code for things that will help too, and so they say that by official release time, many of the issues will be resolved or at least way less frequent.
Also: Keep in mind that a large amount of apps are still not being developed to work under Wayland, and for many good, but also many bad reasons too, and as far as I can tell, my main problems are not with Plasma (other than expectable hiccups), or any KDE apps, but running Gnome apps and other apps under Plasma (Gimp being a big one), that when I check seem to be way behind as to Wayland support, and a few having none at all because the developers or a project lead are resisting, and even refusing to get on board with this new tech!
It was a false perception. The apps keep consuming a high ram 
xd.
That’s why I switched to xfce
So according to you, the problem seems to be with Wayland optimization than Plasma Itself. But with xfce everything went good and not even using Nvidia GPU (Intel Mesa graphics)