I tested a bit where the ram usage of plasma desktop comes from. I have a dual monitor setup. I started with an open terminal which does kquitapp plasma-desktop ; sleep 1 && plasma-desktop I removed all plasmoids, panels, virtual desktops and set both screens to Default Desktop with as wallpaper just plain color white. I did my plasma restart from terminal. RAM usage was at ~25 000K. I set on my 1st monitor some HQ wallpaper included in KDE. RAM usage jumps up to 32 000K. When setting it back it goes back to 25 000K. I experimented with the wallpapers the plain color and virtual desktops. RESULT: It seems plasma-desktop loads every wallpaper from every monitor and virtual desktop into RAM. So when I have 20 virtual desktops and 2 monitors, RAM usage for the wallpapers (5-8MB per wallpaper) is 20*2*6.5=260MB for the wallpapers, this is ok as nobody would add himself 20 virtual desktops, but this also happens if the wallpaper on all monitors and virtual desktops is the *same*. KDE could do a checking if $wallpaper_X now_going into RAM is already in RAM don't load it share it/link it/whatever else load into RAM fi Reproducible: Always
And which exact KDE version is this about? Without a version this report is incomplete.
KDE 4.9.1 openSUSE 12.2
Hello! This bug report was filed for KDE Plasma 4, which reached end-of-support status in August 2015. KDE Plasma 5's desktop shell has been almost completely rewritten for better performance and usability, so it is likely that this bug is already resolved in Plasma 5. Accordingly, we hope you understand why we must close this bug report. If the issue described here is still present in KDE Plasma 5.12 or later, please feel free to open a new ticket in the "plasmashell" product after reading https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Bug_Reporting If you would like to get involved in KDE's bug triaging effort so that future mass bug closes like this are less likely, please read https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Bug_Triaging Thanks for your understanding! Nate Graham