Running an X11 session sits around 2.5GB. On Wayland, RAM usage is well over 3.5 GB (even after disabling services like KDE Wallet, Calendar, etc). Is there something I can do to lower this? Running the system monitor/htop shows a surprising amount of RAM being used by plasma shell. Firefox seems to be taking more RAM than I’m used to when it’s running, too.
I read in another thread about balooctl, and that’s currently disabled.
Disable baloo. If that’s disabled, it’s probably your browser and apps that are remembering things.
It’s been a while since I used plasma but upon a fresh start with nothing running it was like 500-600mb ram usage. I can’t imagine it’s over 1gb unless you have other stuff causing the issues.
I have experience running KDE 5.x on Debian/Ubuntu, and below 1GB was normal there too. Baloo is already disabled on here, going to mess around with it more and see what I can find.
I switched to X11, disabled some background services, and uninstalled some stuff I wasn’t using. Got down to about 2 GB idle.
X11 doesn’t handle my Studio Display well, so I’ve been back on Wayland while doing work. This was taken with one firefox tab and Discord running, which has me below 3GB on the X11 session
Gnome, for me it’s always under 2 gigs idle and I have a bunch of extensions. More importantly the cpu is almost at 0% when idling.
I’m running firefox (one tab open) and it’s idling at around 2.10 Gb (wayland).
Edit: I installed this setup yesterday, so it’s rather pristine, I would say.
Running firefox (one tab open) and it’s idling around 2.40 Gb (wayland). Playing video’s it’s right off the charts.
I’m running multiple apps and it consumes some RAM.
But seriously, what are we doing here? There are RAM hogs and running out of RAM is a problem, but there’s no inherent virtue trying to configure your system into GB of “free” RAM for the sake of it.
Plasma Wayland on Nvidia
Idle
Firefox
Edit: This is really low and i couldn’t care less if it was using 4 GB or more. It doesn’t change one iota how my system works. I have 32 GB memory and it will never used too much. If the system isn’t working properly it’s not a ram issue. It’s software in most cases causing the issue.
Nice, I’m running inside of qemu/kvm. Video here is intel xe. 
Drivers? Hardware itself? Other software issues?
Just had an update on qemu-guest-agent and my cpu load dropped in half. Memory useage is now at 3.05 G. Will have to play a little now.
So this is running on vm?
Correct and kde unstable, also running testing as well.
I’m just waiting till the final release. I tried it for a few hours and decided to revert back with a snapshot and wait.
After pulling out my old time laptop ( very old ) and running Plasma Wayland session, it’s using 2.G mem and 50% of all 4 cores for videos. This old time laptop is smoking my fairly new i7. Out with the new and in with the old.
That’s a lot more reasonable, and closer to my general experience on Plasma. I was close to that earlier today, and I’m not sure if it was from applying system updates or the result of disabling a bunch of services.
Normally I would agree, but I really do need the overhead for my workload this semester
Starting a bunch of volatile apps and then killing a few services based on a single, aggregate number seems like a scattershot in the dark. What are the actual number of individual processes in comparison? And if we care about available memory wouldn’t it be appropriate to utilize some swap?
It feels that all of that may be premature optimization and completely inconsequential to the whatever the actual experience is going to be. Hard to tell without having the system under load.
That said: Good luck. 
I should try to explain the situation better- initially, I was having a surprising amount of CPU usage and RAM usage, specifically when logging into a plasma-wayland session. This was having an impact on performance to the point of kicking the fans on when running 2-3 tabs on firefox.
I did manually disable baloo ^ which I mentioned in the first post, and that did help with the CPU load. However, the RAM consumption stays really high on wayland. That’s not arbitrarily high, but high in comparison to how those same apps and processes behaved on X.
It started to cause some stuttering when I was working on graphics, specifically a 300dpi print. I was also feeling some lag in general use, such as changing workspaces/opening applications.
Last night I decided to just try some other DE’s/WM’s. I landed on Cinnamon as a temporary fix because it’s one of the few X11 based desktops that handles my 4k/5k displays without tinkering.
I’ll probably come back to Plasma in a few months, maybe after 6 drops. I didn’t experience these same issues when I participated in Fedora 40 KDE test week.
I don’t think this is an Endeavour/Arch issue, sorry if I didn’t make that clear earlier. It has to be something with Plasma or how I configured my system.
