Arch Linux

Big Scorpio

Member

Registered: 2024-12-15

Posts: 68

[AVERTED] KDE Plasma high CPU RAM usage

Hello Arch Friends,

I have a problem with KDE Plasma. It uses too much CPU and RAM. Even more than Windows 10!
I have captured screenshots of resource usages between Windows 10, XFCE on X11, KDE on X11 and KDE on Wayland - all of them were on idle with no other system background processes running. I only had Steam and Wireguard running. Of these all KDE Wayland uses the most system resources and XFCE the least with Windows being on par on CPU but not on RAM.

See my screenshots here -> https://imgur.com/a/cF6oggU

My KDE Plasma Version is 6.3.2 and the KDE Frameworks version is 6.11.0 and my Kernel Version is 6.13.5-arch1-1 and my Qt Version is 6.8.2

Is there a way to find out what's eating up my valuable system resources in KDE and castrate disable it? Or what's like KDE (not GNOME or it's forks!) but without the high resource usage?

From what I understand Wayland is not quite finished to be conveniently adopted. Something with Wayland and KDE ends up having the highest CPU usage from what i see.

Last edited by Big Scorpio (2025-04-18 18:15:59)

espresso

Member

From: Pale Blue Dot, US

Registered: 2023-05-15

Posts: 62

Re: [AVERTED] KDE Plasma high CPU RAM usage

Hello!

I would first check without Steam running, as it is not an especially lightweight idler (but can be made more lightweight in some ways via its settings).

There are a few services that can be disabled in KDE settings. Configured, my KDE 6 sat at ~2GB RAM with CPU rather bored.
Checking https://bugs.kde.org/ might help find a KDE-specific cause or general tips.

My experience with Wayland compositors ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Labwc here) seems fairly typical: rock-solid and noticeably more performant than DEs. It should be straightforward to test these by temporarily disabling your display manager (e.g. SDDM).

Last edited by espresso (2025-03-13 04:03:58)

rfx

Member

Registered: 2023-11-21

Posts: 4

Re: [AVERTED] KDE Plasma high CPU RAM usage

Your idle ram-usage usage really looks strange. Also, the fact that Wayland requires 1GB more RAM than x11.

Maybe a service is actually running as espresso suspects, e.g. file indexing? Or some automatic game-updates inside steam

Please remove the autostart of steam and check again

Last edited by rfx (2025-03-13 04:57:11)

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Big Scorpio

Member

Registered: 2024-12-15

Posts: 68

Re: [AVERTED] KDE Plasma high CPU RAM usage

Screwing with KDE and seeing nothing changing made me too tired to proceed. Monkeying with computers like that is not for me (the irony of me using Arch Linux).
So i averted this issue altogether and switched to Cinnamon instead. Seems pretty nice so far and it doesn't act like a crypto miner on my device. Sweet, sweet low system resource usage just like Arch Linux was meant to be.

Last edited by Big Scorpio (2025-04-18 18:14:58)