By default the desktop environment used on Jetson is GNOME, which is a visual environment with animations in the interaction and usability, that has a direct impact on memory usage.

We can see the current amount of memory used by our jetson with the following command

$ free

In this case the Jetson is using 1,282,048 KB equivalent to 1.28 GB.

The way to improve memory consumption is to change the desktop environment from GNOME to LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). LXDE prioritizes performance and memory usage which makes it perfect for applications with hardware limitations or simply optimizing performance, and is also the recommended lightweight window manager alternative by NVIDIA.

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jetsonhacks/installLXDE/main/installLXDE.sh && bash installLXDE.sh
$ sudo reboot

After reboot and login with LXDE desktop environment the memory consumption is 927,388 KB equivalent to 0.92 GB.

$ free

However, even if the desktop environment is changed, the best performance is achieved in Headless Mode.