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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 6 days ago

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

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

That sounds like a performant way to run a system!

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago
[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago
[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 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 5 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] 168 points 1 week ago

Hey, unused memory is wasted memory

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

If you got it, flaunt it.

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[-] [email protected] 114 points 1 week ago

Solution: if you only have 4GB ram, nothing can use more than 4GB

[-] [email protected] 57 points 1 week ago

It absolutely will try, it just gets killed by the oom reaper.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

I had one stick of 16GB and it was not enough. I was going to get a second stick, but said screw it and got two 32GB (it's a laptop and only has two slots).

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

How does that even happen πŸ’€πŸ’€ I have 2x8gb, usually have teams open, Firefox, telegram, a virtual machine with windows 10, a few IDEs and it usually only takes 10-12gb max mostly due to the vm requiring flat 8 gigs

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

/swapfile joined the chat

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[-] [email protected] 88 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

every chat app might use ~1GB because most of them are electron apps, which all spawn their own instance of chromium

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I love how out of every single graphics backend option they chose the chromium Chrome is known for not slowing down after 3 tabs.

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[-] [email protected] 82 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's already been explained elsewhere, but the cache can be free, as needed - that's how linux works.
There's 57+ GB available ram, yet.

[-] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago

Yip, got that now. I misunderstood, as it's different to Windows, which shows cached memory as free since it's available to apps as needed.

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[-] [email protected] 42 points 1 week 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

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[-] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago

Does it mean 35.1 GB out of the 44.3 GB is actually cached? Then you have quite low actual RAM usage considering you have 67 GB.

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[-] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago
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[-] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

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[-] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago

Don't be confused by cached ram, be confused by the oom killer activating while you have plenty of swap and for some reason it kills the shell you ran Firefox from.

If you want to go on a memory allocation adventure try disabling memory overcommit πŸ₯²

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

If you're out of ram and using swap thats when the oom killer should be killing. Swap is not ram.

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

systemd-oomd with its memory pressure model never really worked for me, even after configuring it to be fairly aggressive. My system still irreversibly locks up the second the memory and swap touches 100%. earlyoom with its more primitive model works much better and actually kills processes before the memory and swap hits the ceiling. Combine this with a 2x RAM size swap file and desktop Linux is finally as stable as Windows and macOS. It is just a shame that distros do not configure generous, dynamically growing, swap files and a good oom killer by default, and you have to discover this fundamental problem of the Linux kernel yourself on multiple different devices before realizing what you actually need to do to fix these random freezes.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 week 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.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

~19 Gb firefox

Tf you doing

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

The about:processes page doesn't even add up close to that:

a screenshot of only the memory column in firefox's about:processes page. This shows firefox's main process using 7GB RAM, a 400MB, a 300MB, and a 200MB process, then other smaller ones under 100MB each. Adding up to perhaps 8 or 9 GB

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Then it's just a bug I guess

Or someone is getting very rich in bitcoin right now

[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Someone else pointed out cached RAM is shown as used in Linux, so Firefox is probably showing actual usage and the process list probably includes the RAM cached for Firefox.

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[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

oh i see you're also using a single tab for youtube and no other tabs

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Most RAM Linux reports as in used is actually used as disc cache to speed up the IO.

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

My first thought was that it was running a windows vm…

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

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

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 1 week ago

What are you doing to poor Firefox?

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

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

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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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