[Discuss] excessive memory usage in Ubuntu

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

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-