RAM usage 4 times higher than on Windows

sandmuel

After a week using Vivaldi on my desktop (Linux), I decided to install it on my ROG Ally (Windows). I noticed it used only 250 mb of RAM with no pages open on Windows. On my Desktop it uses 2 gb with no pages open. After discovering this oddly large difference, I decided to install ungoogled chromium on my desktop to check the RAM usage, and to my surprise, it used 750 mb. 2 gb RAM usage isn't a big problem for me since I have 16 anyways, but I would be curious to know the cause of the difference... might it be that I'm using a flatpak? (I would also love to have vivaldi on my raspberry pi zero, and if I can get it using 250 mb that would be great )

Pathduck

@sandmuel Hi - Vivaldi (and most all browsers) use a multi-process architecture so saying "it" uses 2GB ram doesn't really give much info.

And from what I know Linux has a a different way of showing memory use, especially when it comes to virtual memory.

Here's how Vivaldi looks for me on Windows with 1 tab open, this is from Vivaldi's internal Task Manager (Shift+ESC):

Note that all these are different PIDs.

And here's how the same processes show in Process Explorer:

In Linux top you'd sort by %Mem and look at the RES(ident) column which is most similar to the Working Set value of a Windows process.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/176001/what-do-virt-res-and-shr-mean-in-the-top-command
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/resident-set-vs-virtual-memory-size
https://hemantra.medium.com/linux-memory-management-all-you-need-to-know-d1dbdda8b386

npro

@sandmuel I don't have your numbers here with a clean new profile:

❯ sudo ps_mem | grep -E "Private|vivaldi"
 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program
280.4 MiB + 189.6 MiB = 470.0 MiB       vivaldi-bin (11)

or

❯ top -b -n1  | grep vivaldi | awk '{SUM1+=$6} {SUM2+=$7} END {print SUM1-SUM2}'
311416

So maybe there's something else taxing your system, you could ask about that in the Fedora forums https://discussion.fedoraproject.org (or wait for someone using Fedora to respond ofc)

sandmuel

@npro here's Vivaldi in running with just a private window open (viewed in Mission Center)

DoctorG

@sandmuel said in RAM usage 4 times higher than on Windows:

might it be that I'm using a flatpak?

Perhaps.

Catweazle

For me with 3 tabs open ~ 300 MB

alt text

npro

@sandmuel depends on what type of memory that app is reporting. The same applies to what you were seeing with the Microsoft Windows' system monitor. (And I would expect more details from that app about the processes, but I get it, "these days" everything should be... "casual-friendly" (meaning in the end you get these types of questions and more confusion from the "casual user"...))

Catweazle

In the Windows task manager with 4 tabs < 800MB

DoctorG

@sandmuel I do not know how the app reports used memory. I can not test as Mission Monitor crashes my Ubuntu 22 LTS.