Higher Than Usual Ram Usage?

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1

Hi,

On my relatively new Tumbleweed install, the ram usage seems a bit higher than usual. Just opening a few tabs in the Brave browser and having a Konsole window seems to take 3.7 GB of my 16 GB total memory.

free -m shows:

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           14800        3717        1974         223        9657       11083
Swap:          14803           0       14803

I tried closing everything and running just free -m in a Konsole window still results in almost 3 GB being used:

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           14800        2668        3027          62        9492       12132
Swap:          14803           0       14803

I have uninstalled the entire KDE PIM suite, along with disabling baloo file indexing, as I don’t use either of these. The memory usage above is from a fairly minimal KDE install.

Any ideas on what could be causing this?

2

Do you have any particular issue with any application? 3GB with several browser tabs is completely normal (depending on the pages you have open). And RAM does not get freed necessarely when you close an application, but when it is needed by another one. RAM is there to be used. If you want to see which app/process takes the RAM, use something like htop.

3

…removed double post (crappy forum software)…

4

I do know that higher ram usage from a browser is normal, but the usage seems a bit too high even with just a Konsole window open and nothing else (at least in the foreground).

5

Check out a system monitor type app that break it down for you maybe? I can use something like that on Gnome, but looks like you are using KDE - pretty sure they will have something similar available. Probably something like this: Plasma System Monitor

6

Run

top

And watch which process is using ram

7

It is mostly the browser and plasma shell. Still, using about 3 GB on idle seems a bit excess

8

This is with only konsole and firefox open. Firefox with 7 tabs.

> free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.6Gi       4.5Gi       1.0Gi       758Mi       3.2Gi       3.2Gi
Swap:          8.0Gi       445Mi       7.6Gi

Note that most of the memory is cached. This is normal behavior

9

Various operating systems have their philosophy pertaining to RAM usage … Linux inherits the advantage of Unix RAM philosophy.

It shows to use a lot of memory for apps because the default is to use as much available RAM for caching data to maximize performance.

Unused RAM is, for the most part, -wasted RAM- in the Unix | Linux philosophy.

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10

Still, I have noticed the same since Plasma 6, whereas in the mean time, memory footprint for gnome environment has rather shrunk. Indeed unused RAM is wasted RAM but if RAM is used just because of poor software design, sorry but why should we be happy?
it would be interesting to compare what happens if heavy applications are loaded and memory management gets stress-tested. I haven’t done that so can’t comment any further.

11

@opsusemaco On GNOME with wayland and applications taking advantage to offload to the GPU memory has reduced system RAM consumption especially if one has two GPU’s… As long as memory isn’t creeping up (as in a memory leak) all should be fine…

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12
  1. You can NOT compare KDE to GNOME, or any other of the various DEs to each other. … And you can’t compare KDE5 to KDE6.
  2. Not sure who stated “whatever” is poor software design in here (?)
  3. “Heavy CPU stressed” applications are MUCH different than a browser.

Comparing the top speed performance of a Porsche to a child’s tricycle would be similar :+1:

( this should be in Open-Chat )

13

I would ask how this RAM usage is negatively affecting your machine. I find that Brave does tend to be a memory hog and also has background applications within it that may be an additional burden. I currently have Brave (4 tabs) and Thunderbird opened. Used RAM is 3.7GB and cache/buffer RAM is another 6.2GB. I see no reason for concern. Free RAM is bad RAM.

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