Xfce High Memory Usage

Say “what you don’t know, you can learn — if not by studying, then from experience eventually.”

Well, I’ve used Xfce with other distributions and my experience has been that it takes up around 500MB.

Say “Everything is well-documented, and what you don’t know, you can learn”

Well, I read the docs and the docs said a fresh Manjaro Xfce install takes up 380MB of memory.

Say “Did you not notice that wiki information about Xfce is very out of date”

Well I guess it’s not very “well documented” then now is it?

Just because you’re dealing with other knowledgeable people doesn’t mean that talking down to them is such a great course of action. If answering questions on a support forum is such a burden then maybe don’t do it.

From my experience and my studies it is my understanding that people tend to talk down to others as a result of their own insecurities. They need to make others feel small so that they can feel big because in the absence of such hostility all they have left is their own feelings of inadequacy.

Not saying that describes you, just saying that’s what I’ve come to understand both in experience and in print.

P.S. I can assure you I’ve had a great deal of experience when it comes to hostility being thrown my way.

You didn’t ask a question (in the context of my post) and you’re free to ignore anything you don’t like. Personally I like learning, I just tried to provide information. Maybe I phrased it badly.

You chose to ignore the main point, the virtual memory was just a minor correction (which should’ve been obvious from “not quite the same”).

It’s technically correct. It just misses out that it helps if you have a technical mind and you’re willing to learn and put some effort in. As with anything complex, there’s a learning curve. :grin:

[quote="Zinc-Saucier, post:21, topic:148141"] From my experience and my studies it is my understanding that people tend to talk down to others as a result of their own insecurities. They need to make others feel small so that they can feel big because in the absence of such hostility all they have left is their own feelings of inadequacy. [/quote]

I have no feelings of hostility or inadequacy here…but you seem to…all because someone tried to point out a slight inaccuracy as they saw it.

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I wasn’t talking to you. Although I stand by my statement that the term virtual memory was used incorrectly, not by you.

Oops. :man_facepalming:

I hate the way the forum removes the recipient now. Who decided that was a good thing?

Well, yes and no. The term virtual memory refers to the fact that the application does not access the memory addresses directly, and that the kernel can therefore supply the application with an address range greater than what is physically available.

The application doesn’t know how much memory is in the machine, nor whether its own memory contents live in RAM or on the swap device — it doesn’t know the difference. All it knows is how much memory it is theoretically allowed to use within what it perceives as a flat memory range. :wink:


The amount of memory in use is not just dependent of the desktop environment, but also of the supporting operating system structure below it.

Manjaro is systemd-based, and systemd starts a lot of services. Also, the amount of services that it starts has changed over the years, both because of systemd’s own development upstream and because of Manjaro’s evolution.

In addition to that, the memory consumed by a freshly booted system is always lower because there’s only very little caching going on at that point, and no buffering. This changes quire rapidly once you start using a number of applications.

The output from my own system as I showed you higher up was after 7 days of uptime. People who reboot their systems every day don’t come near that amount of caching and buffering.

Those are not the docs. That’s just the promotional talk — which should and will be revised.

Your sarcasm is noted. :roll_eyes:

The Wiki is regularly being updated and articles are being corrected. But there is a difference between technical information and promotional talk. The latter is not documentation but marketing speak, and it’s less important — even though it is outdated.

You are coming awfully close to ad hominem, simply because you have this obsession with memory consumption — albeit without understanding how memory is managed, in spite of our efforts to explain that to you — and for that matter, with numbers that were once important 20 years ago, but which due to the evolution of both software and hardware have become irrelevant.

So have I, and this forum does not appear to be free of it either, by the look of things. Therefore, to bring this pointless discussion and flirting with ad hominems to an end, I am closing this thread.

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