[Discuss] excessive memory usage in Ubuntu

[Tom Luo]

Hi, Dan,

Thanks for your response. I am in the process to setup a VNC server by
following this instruction:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-vnc-on-ubuntu-16-04

It almost works until I run into this problem when I try to connect to the
VNC server:

So as soon as i remote is with the VNC session (the xfce4 desktop is
displayed) but with errors.

xfce unable to determine failsafe session name. possible causes: xfconfd
isn’t running (D-Bus setup problem); environment variable $XDG*CONFIG*DIRS
is set incorrectly (must include… and so on.

I saw someone suggests this solution in the comments section in the
original post:

apt-get install gnome-panel gnome-settings-daemon metacity nautilus
gnome-terminal
I tried this command and then I run into the memory issue.
Even after I reboot this machine, the memory usage is still 98%.
I know 2GB memory is not great, but I just hope it can run a VNC server.
Right now, there is nothing I can do before I solve the memory issue.

Thanks a lot!

Tom Luo


On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 4:12 PM Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> wrote:

> Tom Luo wrote:
> > Hi, all,
> >
> > I am running a Ubuntu 16.04 server (2GB memory and 2GB swap partition).
> At
> > the beginning, the memory usage is fine (less than 20%). However, after I
> > install some packages:
> >
> > apt-get install gnome-panel gnome-settings-daemon metacity nautilus
> > gnome-terminal
> >
> > the memory usage increases a lot, to 99%. The swap partition is also
> almost
> > full.
> >
> > I used the "top" command to see which program is using a lot of memory.
> > However, this is not a single significant program. Every program uses
> less
> > than 5% memory. The problem is very strange and I don't know how to
> > solve this problem because reinstall the system.
> >
> > Any suggestions?
>
> Some questions...
>
> 1. It's rare for a server to need interactive X applications. Is
> that what you meant to have happen?
>
> 2. 2 GB of RAM is not a lot of RAM these days. GNOME is
> explicitly a resource-intensive desktop environment; if you need
> one, maybe you should be looking at XFCE (medium) or LXDE
> (light)?
>
> 3. What happens after reboot?
>
> -dsr-
>