Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.

Friday, July 19, 2019 at 09:49

Comparison of Memory Usages of Ubuntu 19.04 and Flavors in 2019

Continuing my previous Mem. Comparison 2018, here's my 2019 comparison with all editions of Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo". The operating system editions I use here are the eight: Ubuntu Desktop, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu Budgie. I installed every one of them on my laptop and (immediately at first login) took screenshot of the System Monitor (or Task Manager) without doing anything else.

(The Disco Dingo 2019 chart)

I present here the screenshots along with each variant's list of processes at the time I took them. And, you can download the ODS file I used to create the chart below. Finally, I hope this comparison helps all of you and next time somebody can make better comparisons.

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My Specification

I used these setup for all OS editions I installed:

Laptop: Acer AspireOne 756
Processor: Intel Pentium
RAM: 4GB
Swap: 1GB
Root size: 13GB
Filesystem: EXT2
Storage media: USB Flash Drive, SanDisk CruzerGlide 3.0 16GB

The Chart

Download the document file here (ODS).

1. Ubuntu

The original edition runs on 966MiB of RAM. Its largest processes are gnome-shell (92.5MiB), gnome-software (23.4MiB), and Xorg (21.9MiB).

Please click the picture to enlarge it.

2. Kubuntu

KDE KSysGuard reads it runs at 378MiB of RAM. Its largest processes are plasmashell (105MiB), kwin_x11 (28MiB), and Xorg (22.8MiB).

3. Xubuntu

XFCE Task Manager reads it is 406MiB. Its largest processes are blueman-applet 51.4MiB, xfdesktop (39.5MiB), and Task Manager itself (37.7MiB).

4. Lubuntu

Htop shows it 352MiB.

5. Ubuntu MATE

MATE System Monitor reads it 680MiB. Its largest processes are caja (75.4MiB), Xorg (63.3MiB), and blueman-applet (57MiB).

6. Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu has two different sessions, the default one (with normal kernel), and the low-latency one (with low-latency kernel). I used the default one here. XFCE Task Manager reads it 487.6MiB. Its largest processes are blueman-applet (61.5MiB), xfdesktop (49.2MiB), and kdeconnectd (47MiB).

7. Ubuntu Kylin

MATE System Monitor reads it 1.9GiB. Its largest processes are plymouthd (1GiB or 1000MiB), ukui-menu.py (43MiB), and blueman-applet (26.6MiB).

8. Ubuntu Budgie

GNOME System Monitor reads it 929.5MiB. Its largest processes are gnome-software (68.8MiB), budgie-wm (20.9MiB), and Xorg (15.9MiB).

Notes

The largest one is Ubuntu Kylin.
The smallest one is Lubuntu.
Ubuntu original, the GNOME edition, improved a lot from previously 1.2GiB in 2018 to 970MiB in 2019. This is a good thing.
What makes Ubuntu Kylin runs excessively high is plymouthd service (run by root user account) with 50% CPU and 1GiB RAM. Plymouth is the OS component that handles your booting splash screen, but it's too abnormal to have this service consumes resources in such amount. I guess it is at least an error as normally Plymouth should be killed once the user sees the desktop. If I remove plymouthd service from the memory, I can get Ubuntu Kylin running at 847MiB.

Thank you!

This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.