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Every time when I have some memory intensive things running on one user and switch to another one, I can see that the memory usage continues. Is the other user actually still running? If so, is it possible to have Ubuntu save the user workspace state to the harddrive and then kill everything running or something equal?

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    Try using the log out option instead of switch user. Apr 29, 2014 at 14:52

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Is the other user actually still running?

Yes. Linux is a multi-user system by default. This design goes back to early UNIX systems which ran on mainframes and had to support requests from multiple users. These users typically accessed the sytem from specialized hardware known as "dumb" terminals, which were little more than a monitor, keyboard, and a (coaxial) network connection.

A running process is owned by a user, and that user is not required to be logged-in while it is running. Several applications that run on Linux will have and run under their own users. And these users will probably never "log on" to the system.

This is an important concept to understand. By simply executing a "switch user," all you are doing is bringing another user on to the system. Your original user (and all its processes) will remain active on the system.

If so, is it possible to have Ubuntu save the user workspace state to the harddrive and then kill everything running or something equal?

Probably the best option you have here, is to log out from the first user, and then log in as another. This should put a stop to most of the first user's resource footprint. Unless of course that user is running a process in the background, which will "live-on" despite a log out.

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There is not a way to do this currently with Ubuntu's Unity interface. See this related question for a possible solution.

How could Unity2D save sessions?

It is unreliable in Ubuntu Gnome. There is a bug here, which is marked as "Fix Released," but seems to not be fixed. See this related bug if you want to try it.

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