How much ram does gnome-shell need?

[Xinyun Zhou]

On Wed, 2013-08-28 at 19:11 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> According to top:
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
> 31671 mrsam     20   0 2485468 1.367g  30832 S   3.3  8.7 177:39.99 virt-manag+
>  1976 root      20   0 1127408  29764  13276 S   3.0  0.2 172:12.81 libvirtd
>  4342 mrsam     20   0 4731588 2.905g  39776 S   2.7 18.5 354:05.36 gnome- 
> shell
> 
> Does gnome-shell really need 3 gigabytes of RAM, to do WTF it does, and does  
> virt-manager really need 1.3 gigs?
> 

Well, that is sometimes true, but from what I have experienced
gnome-shell is really unpredictable.

This is something I have in my virtual machine. It is running Arch Linux
with gnome-shell. Most of the time you will see CPU > 100%, and I have
tried a clean install, no luck. It seems that memory is not a problem,
however, CPU usage is.

======================================================================
PID USER  PR NI    VIRT    RES   SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+ COMMAND
744 x***  20  0 1760304 358556 39184 S 135.6 17.5 26:20.37 gnome-shell
354 root  20  0  282188  47952  8972 S  17.3  2.3  3:08.10 Xorg
======================================================================

In my hosting OS, which is also running Arch Linux, I have a little
better result.

======================================================================
PID  USER PR NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S %CPU %MEM   TIME+  COMMAND
468  root 20  0  184436  38472  27392 R 29.9  0.2  8:40.70 Xorg
748  x*** 20  0 1925940 378092  50432 S 10.6  2.3  6:47.25 gnome-shell
1887 x*** 20  0 4510972 1.306g 1.243g S 10.6  8.5 40:49.14 VirtualBox
======================================================================

This is the result collected from my Lenovo W520, which has i7-2760QM
and 16G of RAM. Even with that, it is still not enough for gnome-shell
to work smoothly. I have to restart the gnome-shell using C-F2 -> r
sometime to reset the gnome-shell, or even do a log out and log in again
to make work.

But anyway, nothing much I can do.

-- 
Xinyun Zhou