This is bullshit. I wanted to play Terraria last night but I looked at my RAM usage and it was sitting uncomfortably high at 13 GB (of my 15). So, I close Terraria, and it drops about 2 GB. I close Firefox, Thunderbird, and Zed, and that drops about 2.5 GB. Then I close basically everything and it’s still super high! Each time this happens, I have to restart my computer in order to get the RAM usage lower.
Whenever I look this up it’s usually two camps:
- KDE is just bloated.
- Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
To address both of these:
I disabled a few things in KDE like file indexing (which was my home directory). Cool, so that saved like 100 MB. KDE is supposed to idle at around 3GB anyways, so what now?
The “unused RAM” belief is like a folktale at this point. It’s not true anymore, and buffered/cache memory is shown separately. Plus, I can drop those caches whenever I want… Which I did. File inode cache only really became a problem for me when I was doing Minecraft Datapack development and I was creating hundreds of files on a regular basis as part of hot reload. Then I’d have to drop the entire cache because it wasn’t being free’d…
However, the RAM I’m complaining about is actually not that, because it steps on my available RAM meter. Having a game freeze up because I was out of memory is a pain in the ass.
I even tried installing Zram, which only made matters worse since the active memory allocations seemed to be robbing the CPU of time it would be running game code, just so it could compress file pages. (My system has also just had major lag problems with swap, in general, during high memory pressure, which I should probably report as a bug). My swappiness was probably way too high, but regardless I didn’t see major improvements from that and it only seemed like a bandaid to the real problem. Also, why should I need to use swap when I have 16 GB of RAM and only a few programs open at a time?
This whole thing is pretty annoying. Whenever I have like 11 hours of uptime my memory is unusually high. I also can’t seem to track it down to any particular application…
System: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
You haven’t described a single symptom of your RAM usage. Just that you’re using it. Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre?
RAM is meant to be used. I have no clue why you’re worried.
Learn to read RAM usage data. Even after short use, a lot of RAM is in use instead of just free, and that is by design. Look at what it is used for. Because since about the moment Linux got block devices, unused RAM is used as disk buffers.
Just from that screenshot, I don’t see anything wrong. Your load is fine, you’re not swapping, and you have plenty of stuff cached with plenty of room to spare.
Linux will try to cache as much as possible into memory; it doesn’t mean that it’s “using” it. So it seems like you’re conflating memory used with memory availability.
If you start spilling into swap, then you’re getting a little high on your usage. For most people, the default settings for everything are fine; it’s also possible to over-optimize your system into worse performance.
It’s not wrong that free RAM is wasted RAM, at least not if properly used for caching in a way that is simple and fast to release when the system does need more RAM.
If unused RAM is wasted RAM then:
1.) Windows must be using more RAM to be slower a lot faster
2.) Your name is Sam Altman
I am too. Why not use your ram, you paid for it. Else you’re writing to slow files and and caching things. I’d gladly have everything I need in ram if it fits.
What I’m more concerned about is applications releasing ram when I need it back. If I start a game will the browser give back the ram? That’s my only concern though
Memory free ≠ memory available.
Memory free
Memory free? I’ll take a half dozen!
I’ll take the other half!
Dammit, I’m too late.
Yes…
I’m in the unused RAM is wasted RAM camp. Unless I run into problems I don’t care about memory usage. So in your case I would’ve kept playing unless I got constant stutters.
And I think KDE is surprisingly light. Especially compared to older versions.
I mean I think KDE is the heaviest it’s ever been, it just started out heavier than its competitors but grew slower. So it’s light enough now that we’re not using pentium 4 with 1GB RAM.
Use something like ps to list out what is using the RAM
You mention you closed Firefox and it didn’t change but you did not say how you actually measured it.
Start the system up fresh and run this command.
ps faux --sort=-%mem
Or
ps faux --sort=-rss
That will help you track down what is actually using it.
Note: browsers will soak up a ton of memory on modern systems as almost all of them sandbox tabs at this point. If you open a ton of tabs, that will be half your problem.
How many Firefox tabs do you have open? Close Firefox and then look at ram usage
What does the following commands show?
df -h -t tmpfs free -hFollowup on this, if free -h show a lot of buff/cache but df -h -t tmpfs shows little usage then ti’s time to look into btrfs.
You can configure snapper to use less snapshots which makes the RAM usage to handle the different snapshots lower.
You apparently can limit programs memory cap using cgroups. I haven’t tried it however.
Wouldn’t be the first…or 5th time I’ve seen Minecraft max out ram.
Me and some friends managed to crash a guys 64Gig server rack because the modpack my friend made had a bad memory leak.
Meh. My desktop has 64gb and I broke it this morning by loading too much stuff into RAM.
Like half the lines in that screenshot say Firefox, so I’m gonna guess it’s mostly that
Yeah I thought so too. I saved about 1 GB after I took this screenshot by closing Firefox.
“Unused ram is wasted ram” is the worst argument I ever heard because that ram is so I can run MORE THAN ONE PROGRAM instead of some SHITASS WEB BROWSER taking all of it.
If I wanted to go back to the days before multitasking OSes when all ram was taken up by one program cuz you could only run one I’d install FreeDOS. Sick of this shit.
That saying is because “unused RAM” is RAM that is not being used for buffers or cache.
That RAM is quickly freed for applications when it’s requested.
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Someone posted this earlier and it’s a good explanation
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Here is an Ug level explanation if you want something shorter:
Disk slow, memory fast (even compared to an SSD)
If memory fast, why no use memory
Some things load from disk often but slow to wait. Load from disk in advance and keep in memory so fast. Now use memory better.
If not enough memory we let go of other thing to run program.
How work? Magic.
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People keep saying that, but my experience with low end devices says the opposite. The less ram things take, the better. Programs will gladly fill the “unused ram”, but won’t give back as easily, and when we need to open something else, the oom killer isn’t fast enough, and the system freezes with the disk led flashing like crazy, so we have to restart the system and lose recent activity. Unused ram is wasted ram my ass. It’s easy to say that when you have the ram to spare, but without a bit of free unclaimed space, the system goes to shit very often
my debian KDE processes all together idle at around 2.5 gb, you must have a crapload of autostart background processes?
when I have youtube in firefox open, that takes up 4 gigs by itself
