# Xorg RAM usage



## taz (Jul 11, 2010)

Hi...when xorg starts it uses 170 Mb of RAM...i dont know if that is normal but it seems a bit to high..what is your RAM usage?

my setup:
xorg 7.5
openbox
wbar
tint2
xorg nv drivers


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## zeiz (Jul 11, 2010)

My current Xorg usage is ~39MB, fluxbox ~10MB, firefox ~123MB.
Depends how much memory you have: the more you have the more it used; "free memory" is lost memory.


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## taz (Jul 11, 2010)

hmmm i have 512 Mb of RAM...any one else have this high mem usage?


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## Beastie (Jul 11, 2010)

I may be wrong but I think it depends on your X-based applications usage.

I currently have 169M of reserved memory for Xorg.


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## wblock@ (Jul 11, 2010)

taz said:
			
		

> Hi...when xorg starts it uses 170 Mb of RAM...i dont know if that is normal but it seems a bit to high..what is your RAM usage?



Where are you getting your memory usage numbers?  A lot of people misinterpret top(1).


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## aragon (Jul 12, 2010)

Right now mine is much higher - 364 MB.  This is on an AMD64 system with 8 GB of RAM.


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## adamk (Jul 12, 2010)

I highly suggest taking a look at xrestop.

Adam


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## taz (Jul 12, 2010)

wblock said:
			
		

> Where are you getting your memory usage numbers?  A lot people misinterpret top(1).



from top...obviously i have been misinterpreting then :\...how can i found out the real mem usage then?


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## wblock@ (Jul 12, 2010)

Adam's recommendation looks good: x11/xrestop shows "22718K total" for my session.  That's for a 2944x1200 screen and xfce.


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## Alt (Jul 12, 2010)

```
1260 alt           1  46    0   215M   203M CPU0    0   1:59  2.20% Xorg
```
KDE4...


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## aragon (Jul 12, 2010)

xrestop shows a much lower figure for me.  I'm sure top's two memory usage figures (SIZE and RES) must be of relevance still?


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## Alt (Jul 12, 2010)

For example: i get whole top(1) table with `top -bS 1000 > toptest`
Now, i count sum for column SIZE = 3016M
sum for RES = 621M
(note: i have only 512M RAM with nearly 104M swap used)

So about top(1) AFAIK
RES = Process size minus swapped out pages. In other words, this should be exactly "amount of memory(RAM) using by process".
SIZE = Virtual memory used by process. This is RAM used + swap used + shared libs. Note if 2 process share same libs, they will count in both SIZE's, so just sum them is not right.


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