Xfce Forum

MagusZ

Member

Registered: 2020-07-08

Posts: 4

How do I Lower The Resource Usage Once Themed?

Hi,

Crossposting from Reddit (u/December_Stars if you wish to see the original post) since its an issue with any XFCE distro i use and I am sure it may be a bug. I used Xubuntu from February to May of this year on an Asus E403SA with a quad-core Intel Pentium N3700 @ 2.4000 GHz and 4 GB of RAM. Initially I loved it - it did decently well in terms of performance (470 MB with Adwaita for everything, later downloaded a new WM theme called Solarized Dark and changed just the WM theme and it stayed around there). However, after fully themeing it using Arc Darkest Solarized/Material Solarized (switched between both once), Material Solarized Icons and PearDark Cursor, and even with debloating it (removed GNOME Software and some other software) it used 700 MB of RAM on startup. This isn't too much more than other XFCE distros - Debian XFCE and Fedora XFCE both used 650 fully themed, and Artix XFCE Runit went from around 290 MB of RAM usage on fresh boot to 421 MB after being fully themed - but it's still quite a lot more than I'd expect. I can provide screenshots for Xubuntu's resource usage, I lost the Artix XFCE ones in an error on my machine. I looked online and there's just not much information on this but surely I can't be the only one having this.

From my tests on Ubuntu MATE and regular Ubuntu and Fedora, neither have this balloon. Granted, the Arc Darkest Solarized GTK theme I was using did not work on MATE but instead I used Material Solarized Complete Desktop. On GNOME it did work. Neither had a major balloon - MATE went from 441 MB to 502 on bootup whereas GNOME stayed at 1 GB. I have screenshots of these 2 if anyone desires them (the GNOME one is from Fedora).

Does GTK/window manager themeing inherently take up a lot of RAM? Is it the theme I'm using (Arc Darkest Solarized for GTK and WM, Material Solarized Suru for the icons, PearDark for the cursor)? Does XFCE do this by design? Or is it XFCE having a memory leak? I'm pretty sure it's XFCE at this point. I'm looking for max 500 MB of RAM used on bootup and I'd love to get Xubuntu back down to that seeing that I do prefer it to Ubuntu MATE in all other aspects.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,488

Re: How do I Lower The Resource Usage Once Themed?

Hello and welcome.

This is interesting. I'm seeing the same.

Xubuntu 20.04:
- With Greybird theme = 500MB usage
- With Arc theme = balloons to 550MB usage
- Return back to Greybird theme = memory usage stays at 550MB

Perhaps a bug report is the proper way forward.

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MagusZ

Member

Registered: 2020-07-08

Posts: 4

Re: How do I Lower The Resource Usage Once Themed?

Glad (well not really) to see I'm not alone in this. Why would the themes I use in particular balloon it farther than what you got though? Can individual themes do that? Even if they can, they didn't go this far with MATE or GNOME.

I'll file a bug report if there are enough people who also had the same issue.

herbie643

Member

Registered: 2013-04-05

Posts: 138

Re: How do I Lower The Resource Usage Once Themed?

Well I am running a highly modified Arc theme, colors only, and on a cold boot it runs in the low 300's, even now after being up for almost 2hrs ram usage is around 400+- 5mb.
I have no idea why you have this problem even Toz sees it.   Befuddling to say the least.
If you have gnome-system-monitor installed you could check the Processes tab and see which process is using the most memory.   Just a thought.

MagusZ

Member

Registered: 2020-07-08

Posts: 4

Re: How do I Lower The Resource Usage Once Themed?

I've used htop for that, it primarily showed xfwm & xfdesktop as the main culprits. I don't have a screenshot of this though.

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: How do I Lower The Resource Usage Once Themed?

I remember being suprised by the jump in performance once, on a low-specced netbook, when I changed the icon theme.

I always assumed it was mainly related to the weight of the resources, be it icons or theme picture elements, but I have no idea if it is really so, I'd be interested to learn more details on this topic.

I still try to "notice" any change in responsiveness/workload when I change themes or icon sets. I'm no longer on that slow machine but hey, the lighter the better, isn't it?