performance on old laptop

Hello!

I’ve an old laptop with 2GB RAM. Kodi has been mostly fine for several versions since v13/v14 but the latest v17.1 is quite sluggish sometimes. I’ve seen this sluggishness occasionally on v16 as well.

A typical use case for me is to watch photos. When I open and exit a few folders with 500 to 1000 photos Kodi takes several seconds to respond to even a back command.

Question: is it just a case of too low resources or is there something I can tweak in the system to get better performance? Why does the kodi-bin process show more than 3GB VIRT?

There is good amount of RAM free soon after boot as per top:

After opening/exiting a few folders, RAM is almost full but swap is still not used:

Few other details:
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5 CPU M 560 @ 2.67GHz
$ uname -a
Linux Living-KODI 3.13.0-86-generic #131-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 12 23:33:13 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ cat /etc/issue.net
Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
$ dpkg -l | grep “kodi-bin”
ii kodi-bin 2:17.1~git20170320.2031-final-0trusty amd64 Kodi Media Center (binary data package)