Every panel applet on #Cosmic takes about 33 MB of RAM each, resulting to Cosmic using 2.4 GB of RAM on a cold boot. That is excessive for a brand new, "clean" DE, and on par with #Windows (that has a history of 40 years that needs to carry with it).
I honestly don't understand why it's like that. Most people try #Linux on their older PCs, or a main PC that isn't #Windows11 -capable. Cosmic is just out of their reach for many of potential new users.
[#]opensource #foss #pop_os #popos #system76
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@eugenialoli It is my understanding that System76 is mainly a hardware company - trying to make money selling people new PCs.
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@fennek They are, although the lead of the OS has almost a carte blanche over the OS decisions, and he is a software guy. So it should have been more optimized.
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@eugenialoli It's still in alpha. Don't expect everything to be optimized just yet (but other than that yes, RAM usage should be looked into).
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@simonjust This is an excuse I'm afraid and not in line with software engineering. To reduce RAM in this case, you'd need to re-architect part of it, and that would result in major new bugs. These changes needed to be done BEFORE we entered these public releases.
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@eugenialoli "Not in line with software engineering"? Show me a properly engineered system with no bugs. They only exist in books :blobgrin:
People have been arguing about how to do software engineering right for years, and no one does it. Not even those that are paid billions to do it.
I don't think Cosmic was intended to run on older, low-end machines in the first place. I think the target is to have it running on System76 PCs (8GB RAM baseline) and the rest is just a bargain
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@simonjust Look at the other reply here, the link shows where it doesn't fit on 8 GB of ram if the user has too many fonts or icon packs installed. Yes, you read that correctly..
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@eugenialoli The link is missing, but yes if that's the case, there's clearly something wrong.
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@simonjust here it is https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-applets/issues/723#issuecomment-2575978172
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@eugenialoli Alright - that's crazy. My GNOME (Ubuntu) uses just about 2,6 GB ram after a fresh boot
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@eugenialoli If you read the issue then you'd understand it's not an architectural issue. Just a matter of some libraries needing more optimization work. Again, there's a lot of areas that can be optimized, and we'll get to them before the release. So I'd advise against making blanket judgements today as if this is the way things are always going to be.
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@mmstick Fixing the caching issue still won't get you below 1.5 GB of ram on a cold boot. It's only part of the issue.
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@eugenialoli Cold boot is already less than 1 GB right now. And it'll be even lower once we finish building app and applet updates from the recently-merged FontSystem optimization from this morning.
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@mmstick Over here gnome-system-monitor and top reports 2.4 GB. How do you get the 1 GB?
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@mmstick I will wait for your fixes during RC releases. But I'm not holding my breath.
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@mmstick @eugenialoli This makes. As a developer myself, we often make it work first, and then streamline it to make it performant.. At least thats how I work.
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@codemonkeymike @mmstick @eugenialoli Right ? Optmizing when you still don't have a full picture of how everything works and fits together is a waste of time unless you're REALLY familiar with the domain you're working on. Early optimization is a project killer.
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@ojonnysilva @mmstick @eugenialoli exactly. I mean of course make good early organizational decisions. But over optimizing early really puts the cart before the horse.
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@eugenialoli Memory leaks in Rust are considered to still be memory safe
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@slyecho I don't think it's memory leaks in this case, as it's consistent on a cold boot. It's just bad architecture or lazy code imho.
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@eugenialoli There's nothing wrong the architecture. You could have always asked directly if you wanted to know the current state of things instead of making assumptions.
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@eugenialoli KDE uses similar if not more ram. 2.4GB is actually reasonable for a DE of this range. It needs to be more optimized, sure, but this isn’t the worst.
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@RahulVadhyar KDE starts here at 1.3 GB, not 2.4. Same for Gnome.
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@eugenialoli are you talking about about a minimal setup, or a full fledged one similar to what you get on Fedora?
Because fresh fedora KDE installs definitely takes up more than 3GB of ram. My shell is 500Mb, kwin is another 500Mb, plus the other services make up more than 3GB.
Minimal KDE arch install though, that’s more like 2GB total, but u still need a lot of services to make it daily drivable(atleast for me anyways)
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@RahulVadhyar Fedora is also one of the most bloated OSes in terms of RAM. Ubuntu is close behind too. However, Kubuntu is not too bad, and that's not a minimal setup.
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@eugenialoli I think you and I define “bloat” in different ways, and I feel like that’s where our disagreements are coming from.
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@RahulVadhyar If your Linux is using from the get go (before counting caching), over 1 to 1.3 gb of RAM, then that's bloat. Especially when other distros do the exact same things for half the ram, or in some cases, 1/3 the ram.
Don't let me started on Alpine that loads XFce at 250 MB of RAM, when Xubuntu or Fedora XFce do so at well over a gig. Even Debian with systemd does that at 800 mb. So yes, bloat is a very real thing on some linux distros.
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@eugenialoli Well, even if I wanted to switch from fedora to reduce bloat there really isn’t a good alternative for my needs, ideally some of the things I look in a distro is
-Frequent updates and up to date packages
And optionally secure boot support with Nvidia drivers.
Ubuntu, arch, openSUSE, immutable distros, gentoo, nixOS, etc I cannot use. Hence whether I like it or not, looks like I am on fedora.
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@RahulVadhyar Debian-Testing is that OS, it's my main OS, and it's super stable despite being a rolling release. It takes only 1.2 GB of RAM with Gnome. And even if it might miss 1 feature you mentioned (e.g. the nvidia stuff), it's not worth the extra DOUBLE the RAM for it.
Also, Linux Mint is perfect for what you suggest, minus the up to date packages sometimes (although there's flatpak integration). That's 1.1 GB of RAM.
Fedora AND Ubuntu are very heavy for what they worth.
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@eugenialoli Fwiw they claim it can be brought under control by configuring the libraries they're using better (https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-applets/issues/723#issuecomment-2575978172)
So blaming this on architectual incompetence feels malicious
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@personifieddevil I'm not malicious, that's slander. I'm simply calling it as I see it. And what is described at what you linked, IS architecture. It's bad, wasteful design. And the engineer who replied didn't even mention that it needs fixing (it does). He just let it be. To me, that IS incompetence. I'm actually SHOCKED by his explanation!!
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Reminder that COSMIC is in alpha; and therefore we aren't finished implementing features or optimizations yet. "Clean" code usually allocates the most memory because optimizations often require a lot of additional complexity. Memory usage is also a type of optimization, which requires profiling and then careful optimization work to reduce allocations. You've probably heard that it's more important to make it work first, and then make it fast. As premature optimization is the root of all evil.
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We've already profiled which areas will have the most impact for improving memory usage a while back. The majority of memory usage in libcosmic is from the rustybuzz and fontdb libraries used by cosmic-text. To support all languages, all fonts are currently being cached. So it's just a matter of implementing an algorithm to cull unused fonts. Which fontdb currently doesn't do for us.
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For applets, tiny_skia also preallocates a very large buffer (12 MB) to use as a clipping mask. There's an open issue for this that's a few years old, but it's understandable that they haven't optimized this yet. The amount of code required to optimize that would be vast, and so it wouldn't be so tiny anymore if it had all the advanced optimization algorithms that skia uses.
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I've also seen that the freedesktop-icons library allocates much more than necessary for parsing and caching icon theme metadata. This is an easier area to optimize, but again will require replacing rust-ini for something lighter, which will be more complex.
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@eugenialoli I've not used Cosmic but my understanding is that they're using a similar architecture for panel indicators that we used on Unity.
On Unity each indicator reported using roughly that amount of RAM, but if you looked at it closely almost all of it was shared memory. The Linux kernel will allocate read-only memory spaces into the process for things like libraries and icon caches that are memory mapped. This shows up as memory for the process but in reality doesn't cause more usage.
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@eugenialoli my system reports around 1gb. And that's just updated today.
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@chriscochrun My system reports 2.4 with gnome system monitor.
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