Background services using too much ram

Ask Fedora
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1

06.08.2025.04.56.52
06.08.2025.04.56.521920Ă—1080 114 KB

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what is background services?
how can i stop it from using too much ram (sometimes reaches 1.5 GB). i cant manually kill it from system monitor.
im using fedora kde.

2

From the 3-dot menu of the Applications panel (just to the right of “Configure Columns”), check the “Show Details Sidebar” box.

Screenshot_20250806_085201
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Then click on the “Background Services” Item and you’ll see a breakdown of memory usage per service.

This is what I see right now on my system:

Screenshot_20250806_085337
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3

They are services that provide features to your system that must be running all the time to do that.

Are you sure that 1.5G is not a good use of the memory to provide useful services?

I almost always use command line tools to investigate performance issues.
You can get some insight into service memory usage with this command:

systemd-cgtop -b1
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since the total sum of the memory i can see is around 1.2 gb.
but the used memory is 2.7 gb.
i figured that the system is using that difference. (is this wrong?).
and i thought that background services is just something unnecessary.

5

Have a look at the output of free -h which will list the kernel buffers and caches. The kernel will free up the caches if there is a better use for the memory. The caches speed up, for example, disk accesses.

6

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sorry but can you explain the output and how its usefull

7

Please paste text output as preformatted text not screen shots.

You can find the documentation for free using the command man free.
The man page explains what each value means.