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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Possibly related:

screen shot of memory usage by app, showing Firefox using over 18GB of RAM

I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

You can really download more ram if you use cloud storage as swap

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

That sounds like a performant way to run a system!

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago
[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago
[-] [email protected] 28 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Many people who don't know what they're talking about in this thread. No, used memory does not include cached memory. You can confirm this trivially by running free -m and adding up the numbers (used + cached + free = total). Used memory can not be reclaimed until the process holding it frees it or dies. Not all cached memory can be reclaimed either, which is why the kernel reports an estimate of available memory. That's the number that really matters, because aside from some edges cases that's the number that determines whether you're out of memory or not.

Anyway the fact that you can't run Linux with 16GB is weird and indicates that some software you are using has a RAM leak (a Firefox extension perhaps?). Firefox will use memory if it's there but it's designed to cope with low memory as well, it just unloads tabs quicker so you have to reload often. There are also extensions that make tab unloading more aggressive, maybe that would help - especially if there's memory pressure from other processes too.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Yeah the cache as part of used memory theory didn't stack up. This comment (sorry, Lemmy probably doesn't handle the link well) showed 54GB in use, 30GB cached, and 13GB available. 54+12 = 67GB total so cached doesn't seem to be counted as in use since it should be counted as free (mostly).

In the end, I'm pretty sure it's a memory hog website. It kept filling up until GNOME crashed and I lost my progress (I was trying to order prints for 1000 photos on a horrible website that made me change settings one photo at a time, and the longer I took the more RAM filled up).

Anyway the fact that you can’t run Linux with 16GB is weird

I mean, it runs fine. It's more how I'm using it. Firefox 4GB, Element 1GB, Signal 1GB, Beeper 1GB, Steam 2GB, Joplin 1GB. That's all just open and idle (chats and Steam don't even have windows, just background) and are the minimum I would have open at any point. That's already 10GB. By the time I open a couple of windows in a Jetbrains IDE or a particularly demanding website and suddenly it's suffocating.

[-] [email protected] 42 points 6 days ago

many Linux distros are optimized to use as much available RAM as possible, free RAM is wasted RAM

Most would still run with a lot less anyway

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Mine was definitely not handling 16GB...

[-] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

what do you mean? not working well with 16 gb??

[-] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

Correct. If I had a lot of stuff open (I like to keep stuff open for when I get back to it) then the whole system was slow and would sometimes lock up completely. I needed to close things to keep it stable.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

Linux isn't going to help much when the applications are using a lot ram. Firefox is an absolute ram hog linux or windows. Linux is just going to use less of the ram for it self.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

Oh the applications sure were using a lot of RAM, I can't deny that.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

something is wrong. I have a gaming rig I also use for work, it has 16GB on it and I have never strugled running anything

I dont know what you mean by a lot but i normally have 10 sites opened (including ms 365 garbage), teams, omnissa client, a few specs usually PDFs, signal, deezer all running on Hyprland and it runs smooth like butter

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I was running mint with 4gb with steam and signal on background as well as Firefox with 2 tabs open. Not perfect but definitely usable

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I traced this back to a particular rogue website. But yeah I think GNOME uses more RAM anyway, then having everything containerised in Bazzite is extra RAM I'm sure. Then having like 5 chat apps, Steam Firefox, etc open was easily eating up my 16GB RAM. Of course more RAM means more is used because unused RAM is wasted RAM, so it's hard to judge one system against another.

[-] [email protected] 32 points 6 days ago
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[-] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

every chat app needs over a gig of ram to itself for "developer productivity"

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

I got surprised like two days ago when I got a desktop notification that Linux kernel killed a process, because there was no memory available, or something like that. I didn't know it can do that, lol.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

Pretty useful for not getting locked out. It can be finetuned if you want to assign priorities and that.

It is usually handled by systemd-oomd.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago

I have a memory consumption issue with Ubuntu, because I stupidly set up the system to have 0 swap. This means under high memory pressure, the entire system could suddenly crash.

To be fair, Windows isn't a shining beacon either because whenever I attempt something very GPU intensive like running local LLMs the GPU overheats in a split second before the fans have time to spin up and the entire system shuts down.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

How does that happen? Shouldn't the GPU and CPU have thermal throttling so even under intense loads it just slows down to keep temps down?

When I play games on my laptop the integrated graphics are at 100% most of the time but it doesn't cause the system to crash.

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb (30gb is the normal load I see after browser restart) 18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb

[-] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago

What are you doing to poor Firefox?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

Firefox with an inflation fetish

[-] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

How do you do this? I usually have about 2k open tabs and my firefox uses a fraction of that.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I don't know if this is something to brag about, it seems more like something isn't working right...

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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
393 points (97.3% liked)

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