| broulik |
| Plasma |
We currently show how much cache is used. It's a completely useless value to know vs how much memory is free and leaves this applet out of sync with all the other memory monitors.
It's problematic because the bar is inconsistent with the tooltip, and
by default the system load viewer chooses a colour very similar to the
application used memory making the UI actually worse.
BUG: 391918
Ran it
(there's some unrelated bugs/warnings in this applet that need fixing)
Bar showed a sensible value that matched tooltip, rather than
looking 100% full all the time
| Automatic diff as part of commit; lint not applicable. |
| Automatic diff as part of commit; unit tests not applicable. |
It's a completely useless value to know vs how much memory is free.
FWIW, I find it's a useful information to assess the state of a system: It grows with time after a reboot, and it shows nicely how memory intensive processes eventually take a toll on the cache until they are closed and I'm left with lots of free memory but only little cache. Quickly seeing the difference between "completely free" and "cached" can be quite useful.
IMO it would be enough to adapt the colours a bit (and possibly improve the tooltip), to bring out the difference between "used" and "completely free + cached" a bit more.
Quickly seeing the difference between "free" and "cached" can be quite useful.
Useful for what?
For a start, there's a problem with a system (and thus performance) if cache usage is always very low. "Unused" memory does not help in this case. Seeing this value staying in a "good" state helps to confirm that despite large memory hogs coming and going the cache is utilized optimally. If not, I might add more memory or change the system configuration (e.g. ban Electron apps ;) to improve cache utilization. If I would only see "free" memory, I would not be able to evaluate this.
Unless you know how much of that cache was actually read back, you have absolutely no knowledge of whether the cache was utilised properly or not.
In your example seeing the cache value stay "good" is giving you the same result as seeing the free memory stay "good" just arguably with the effect lingering ever so slightly longer.
In a sense the cache tells me about aggregated memory pressure from the past (because the cache will only slowly fill up again after it was squeezed), and the unused memory is a metrics showing the current memory pressure.
I find it useful, and apparently when it was first introduced in KDE and later ported to Plasma it was deemed useful. It's a power user tool anyway, please don't tell users to go back to xosview (which won't work on Wayland).
I see where you are coming from, though. Maybe you can make this transparent by default, and anyone liking the feature could turn on the colour again?
It's a power user tool anyway,
I'm not sure we're talking about the same place. This is the little overview applet, systemloadviewer
KSysguard is the power tool.
Even that doesn't show it by default, but it's available if you choose to add custom sensors. I'm not intending on changing that.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same place. This is the little overview applet, systemloadviewer
Yup, that's exactly the thing I'm talking about. At this point I don't care that much about the other options, but it would be annoying if the applet lost that feature. I felt this might concern a lot of users using this, so I spoke up. I don't want to block improvements, but maybe we can find a compromise here. Removing features which have been there for a long time is always a bad message to send when one of our goals is polishing.
We're at an impasse then.
I do like and respect having your feedback, but I'm not particularly swayed. It leaves this one super tiny summary applet showing more "detailed/noisy" information than the full on ksysguard application, which doesn't make sense. We can be pretty sure there's no-one currently using it for that, based on the fact that by default it's currently the same colour as the regular memory so impossible to see.
Can someone else from Plasma make a decision either way.
Only if you make this a yes/no decision. There are still options for a compromise which would fit both use cases.
by default it's currently the same colour as the regular memory so impossible to see.
The colour could be changed, or it could be made an option defaulting to off.
Either things are consistent or not consistent with other applets.
That is a yes/no case.
FWIW, now the applet is inconsistent with KInfoCenter → Memory, which does show the cache.