cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

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Appalbarry3

cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by Appalbarry3 »

Question: What is cinnamon-screensaver, and why does it consistently eat up 250+ MiB of memory?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
brara

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by brara »

same question, 290+MB --- for what?
cipri_tom

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by cipri_tom »

**bump**
same here. Is it really needed?
Vorty

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by Vorty »

Same issue here, cinnamon-screensaver is currently at 400+MB.
Is there any reason for that or a way to solve what seems like it could be an issue?
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karlchen
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Location: Germany

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by karlchen »

Hi, folks.

Here are some answers to similar questions which have been asked over the past few months:

First question:
Appalbarry3 wrote:Question: What is cinnamon-screensaver
You have installed Linux Mint 17 with the Cinnamon desktop.

Code: Select all

$ cinnamon --version
Cinnamon 2.2.16
And you are seriously asking what a process might be the name of which is cinnamon-screensaver?

You all know the man command, don't you! The command which will display the manpages for any given command. So have a look at what

Code: Select all

man cinnamon-screensaver
will tell you.

Code: Select all

cinnamon-screensaver(1)                        General Commands Manual                    cinnamon-screensaver(1)

NAME
       cinnamon-screensaver - screen saver and locker

SYNOPSIS
       cinnamon-screensaver [OPTIONS...]

DESCRIPTION
       Cinnamon  Screensaver  is  the default screen saver and locker in a GNOME desktop. It is designed with simplicity
       and security in mind.

OPTIONS
       --no-daemon
              Don't become a daemon

       --debug
              Enable debugging code

       This program also accepts the standard GTK options.

AUTHORS
       cinnamon-screensaver is written by William Jon McCann <mccann@jhu.edu>.

       This manual page was written by Sven Arvidsson <sa@whiz.se>.

SEE ALSO
       gtk-options(7)

Cinnamon                                               2007-09-27                             cinnamon-screensaver(1)
First answer: "Cinnamon Screensaver is the default screen saver and locker ..."


Second question:
Appalbarry3 wrote:and why does it consistently eat up 250+ MiB of memory?
Is it really? Which memory figures are you looking at?
Let us check what gnome-system-monitor displays on my Linux Mint 17 32-bit Cinnamon system about cinnamon-screensaver.

Image
(Linux Mint 17 cinnamon-screensaver process properties. - Click image to enlarge. Press <alt><cursor_left> to return here)

Second answer:
Telling from the sizes which you report you are all looking at virtual memory (first circle). But virtual memory is not the amount of memory which the process currently uses. It is only the amount of memory it could use.
More interesting are the figures of resident memory and shared memory.
Shared memory is the amount of memory which cinnamon-screensaver uses, but it does not use alone, instead it shares it with other processes.
Resident memory is the amount of physical memory which cinnamon-screensaver currently really occupies.

Hope this clears up your questions.

Cheers,
Karl
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Vorty

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by Vorty »

Hi Karl,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. However, using the system monitor the way you did, here are the figures I get for cinnamon-screensaver:
http://imgur.com/Wct8Q0s.png

So the resident memory (422MB), while being a little lower than the virtual one (488MB), is still particularly high. Or am I missing something?

Precision: I'm also using Linux Mint 17 Qiana.
Last edited by Vorty on Mon Oct 20, 2014 9:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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karlchen
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Location: Germany

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by karlchen »

Hello, Vorty.

Yes, indeed, more than 400 MB of resident memory seems more than just a little bit too much. :shock:
In particular compared to the 18 MB on my system. And I only checked after cinnamon-screensaver had had a chance of being active for a while, i.e. I allowed my machine to acativate the screensaver and save the screen for a while.
I am afraid I have got no good idea why this may happen.
By the way my cinnamon-screensaver is version 2.2.4, as displayed by "cinnamon-screensaver --version". And my Mint 17 Cinnamon uses the nouveau driver for its nVidia ION graphics chip.
Does cinnamon-screensaver have a resident size of more than 400 MB from the start? Or does the memory consumption grow in the course of time? My home system often are up for a few hours only. Only the office machine will be in use for 8 or 9 hours per day. Though I did not check the memory used by cinnamon-screensaver on the office machine recently, it cannot be high, because when all applications have been terminated before I shut it off at the end of an office day memory usage is displayed at around 500 MB, something between 500 and 600 MB.
I wonder whether the resident memory size of cinnamon-screensaver could in any way correspond to the dedicated video memory a machine has? The Zotac home box with the ION chip has got tiny 256 MB of video RAM only and the office machine not much more, either, though it has got 4 GB of normal RAM.

Kind regards,
Karl
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Vorty

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by Vorty »

Thanks Karl! I'm also using Mint 17 with cinnamon-screensaver version 2.2.4. However I'm using the nvidia-331 (version 331.38-0ubuntu7.1) proprietary driver (I switched as I've had issues with a 3D program when using nouveau in the past), and my graphic card is a nVidia Quadro K2000 with 2GB of RAM.
The difference is also, as you suggested, with the uptime which had reached 39 days. After a restart I'm back to very low normal values similar to the ones you've been reporting (20MB of resident memory), so I'm sure it must have had something to do with that. I'll try to keep track of how it increases after days without restarting and see if there is a trend indicating a regular increase over time.
Vorty

Re: cinnamon-screensaver Memory Usage

Post by Vorty »

As a follow up from my previous post, I can confirm that there is a somewhat linear increase of the memory (virtual and resident) taken by cinnamon-screensaver over time. Here are the values I have been measuring with the corresponding uptime:
Time Virtual/Resident memory in MB
1 hour: -/20
40 hours: 106/40
64 hours: 119/53
98 hours: 134/68
164 hours: 170/103

And if I try to plot the memory usage I previously reported (422MB after 39 days), it seems I'm on track to get to that figure again when reaching the same uptime. So whatever the problem is, it seems repeatable on my machine at least. It could be interesting for someone else (maybe one of the previous posters?) to try to replicate my measurements.
I'd also be interested in any opinion on what could be the cause of this and idea on what I could try to change to see if it affects the use of memory by cinnamon-screensaver.
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