Bug#844006: gnome-system-monitor: Memory usage statistic may be wrong

[Antonio Trueba]

Package: gnome-system-monitor
Version: 3.22.0-1
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

In the "resources" page, the memory graphs in my system are showing a different value than those of top: at the time, g-s-m is showing 1.0 GiB used (28,3%) out of 3,7 GiB, while "top" running in a terminal is showing "3845332 total, 1731960 free, 697804 used, 1415616 buff/cache".

I've been getting those readings recently with a freshly booted system, and I consider them a little too high for my system, so lately I've been trying to reduce that memory usage, to little or no result.

As it happens, these last days I've tested a few live distros in this machine, including Jessie with a very similar setup as that of my regular system, and found the memory usage to range between 600-700 MiB in those setups. After comparing those readings to the present "top" output, I think this version of gnome-system-monitor is somehow miscalculating the memory usage.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.8.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=es_ES.utf8, LC_CTYPE=es_ES.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages gnome-system-monitor depends on:
ii  dconf-gsettings-backend [gsettings-backend]  0.26.0-2
ii  libc6                                        2.24-5
ii  libcairo2                                    1.14.6-1.1
ii  libgcc1                                      1:6.2.0-13
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0                           2.36.0-1
ii  libglib2.0-0                                 2.50.2-1
ii  libglibmm-2.4-1v5                            2.50.0-1
ii  libgtk-3-0                                   3.22.3-1
ii  libgtkmm-3.0-1v5                             3.22.0-1
ii  libgtop-2.0-10                               2.34.1-2
ii  libpango-1.0-0                               1.40.3-3
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0                          1.40.3-3
ii  librsvg2-2                                   2.40.16-1
ii  libsigc++-2.0-0v5                            2.10.0-1
ii  libstdc++6                                   6.2.0-13
ii  libsystemd0                                  232-3
ii  libwnck-3-0                                  3.20.1-2

Versions of packages gnome-system-monitor recommends:
ii  gvfs  1.30.2-2

gnome-system-monitor suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information