System Monitor - 170+ processes, large ammounts of ram, cpu out of control.

[Toxhicide]

Title sums up my problem. Im running so many processes in Slackware, running KDE. I dont even run that many programs, and already its more than XP has (by a **** load). What is wrong here, and how do i kill a lot of the processes to cut down on my cpu usage by tons and cut down memory usage while still keeping everything the same?

Heres a picture of my system monitor -

img651 DOT imageshack DOT us/img651/5994/systemmonitorz.png

I didnt put image tags because its a fullscreen.

Edit: The memory rises over time, when I restarted my computer it was up to 500 - 600 mbps. At the minute after I posted this, its at 360.

[elija]

That looks OK to me.

Most of those processes will be sleeping (ie doing nothing until they are needed). On my Slackware laptop (XFCE) I have 149 processes after boot. All bar 2 are currently asleep and one of those is top

Memory on Linux will be used. Most of it will be for buffers and cache. To see this working,

Reboot your machine
Run either Open Office or Firefox. Roughly time how long it takes to open.
Close it
Run it again.

if you open a terminal and run the command free you will see something like this

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       4057720    3888640     169080          0     250768    2789948
-/+ buffers/cache:     847924    3209796
Swap:      6384632       7420    6377212

The line highlighted shows actual memory use.

[edit]
If you want to see what's really going on in Windows have a look at Process Monitor
[/edit]

[Toxhicide]

Ive only recently switched, and I guess Im going to have to get used to those. When I used linux last time, it wouldnt run that many processes at all and was very easy on your ram and cpu - but Ive got to say, ive never lagged yet, and its using a lot above what Windows did.

Are there any useless things I can get of to start?

[Toxhicide]

Alright, heres an update.

When I looked at the picture I posted earlier thats actually 1/4 of what I normally see. Ive been running my computer for a while now and this is what its been for hours.

img571 DOT imageshack DOT us/img571/8042/newmemory.png

Is that normal? Because it seems like it - and Im getting used to seeing that.

[elija]

That looks fine to me. Most of the memory used as I said will be to speed things up and will be freed for real work as needed. Another way to look at it is; if an operating system isn't going to use all available memory then that memory would be more use sitting on your desk. At least it would look cool

It looks like most of the processes are KDE related and I have only used KDE enough to decide that I don't like it so I have no idea what they are or if they are important.