When I do a fresh boot and start chromium it takes about 6 seconds for the blank start page to appear. If I invoke “top” I can see it running and using memory. Now if I close chromium and look at “top” output I can see that it is no longer running or using memory. But if I start chromium again it only takes 1 second for the same blank start page to appear. This would indicate to me that chromium remains loaded into memory even if it is shut down. Can someone confirm this please? And if that is the case, what command would confirm it is still in memory and what command would I use to unload it from memory?
Linux, like other modern operating systems, stores recently used data in a cache in memory (shared libraries, executable data etc.) which is freed when it’s being requested by another application.
Hence Chromium doesn’t need to load the libs from the disk but starts instantly.
If you type free in a terminal, the number on the first line to the right is the memory being used to cache data - this memory is used when applications request it, so it’s by no means “wasted”. Unused memory is wasted
When I start chromium the first time after boot, I do hear a lot of disk activity. That’s probably the same as what you are talking about.
As far as I know, unix applications lose all memory when the process ends. So chromium cannot be caching anything in memory. The kernel, however, can and does try to use memory efficiently. When re-usable code is loaded into memory, the kernel will keep it there and keep track of it even after the process ends. If that re-usable code is needed again, it can be used from what is already in memory instead of needing to be reloaded. The kernel frees the memory when other memory demands require that.
What is likely kept in memory is the text segment of the chromium executable, and the dynamic libraries (shared objects) that it uses.
There’s actually no need to do anything. This is just the linux kernel being efficient in memory management.
