Possibly related:
I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.
You can really download more ram if you use cloud storage as swap
That sounds like a performant way to run a system!
Someone really did it
Haha I just searched up this person using Google Drive as swap π―
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/rrb7gk/you_cant_download_more_r/
Lol nice
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
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.
Hey, unused memory is wasted memory
If you got it, flaunt it.
Solution: if you only have 4GB ram, nothing can use more than 4GB
It absolutely will try, it just gets killed by the oom reaper.
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).
How does that even happen ππ 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
/swapfile joined the chat
every chat app might use ~1GB because most of them are electron apps, which all spawn their own instance of chromium
I love how out of every single graphics backend option they chose the chromium Chrome is known for not slowing down after 3 tabs.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Electron apps are bullshit though.
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.
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 π₯²
If you're out of ram and using swap thats when the oom killer should be killing. Swap is not ram.
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.
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.
~19 Gb firefox
Tf you doing
The about:processes page doesn't even add up close to that:
Then it's just a bug I guess
Or someone is getting very rich in bitcoin right now
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.
oh i see you're also using a single tab for youtube and no other tabs
Most RAM Linux reports as in used is actually used as disc cache to speed up the IO.
My first thought was that it was running a windows vmβ¦
every chat app needs over a gig of ram to itself for "developer productivity"
18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb (30gb is the normal load I see after browser restart) 
What are you doing to poor Firefox?
How do you do this? I usually have about 2k open tabs and my firefox uses a fraction of that.
Hint: :q!
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