Low memory usage in Fedora

Ask Fedora
1

I have the opposite problem to many here. I have a older Dell with an I3 processor and 16GB memory (upgraded from 4GB when I first installed Fedora). When using the system monitor, the most memory I ever see used is ~6GB, and it is common to see under 4GB in use. I can open several programs at once and it does not increase the memory in use.

At the same time, when starting programs I get repeated messages “XXXXX is not responding, cancel or wait.”

The laptop does run better than when I only had 4GB memory - Chrome would not run at all previously, and in system monitor the processor would not run at full capacity, which it does appear to be doing now.

This is my first post - please be kind. I have more information about the system that I can share but don’t know what is appropriate. I do have fpaste information I can share if asked.

Thanks in advance for any help.

2

Look for more details in the journal. A good way to do this is to run journalctl —no-hostname —follow in a terminal and then start one of the problematic programs.

3

What does free -h report?
Linux will use memory as demand on the system rises.
If apps are not directly using memory the kernel will cache file in memory.

1 Like
4

Performance is not only about RAM, CPU and disk IO play a big role as well. Do you have an SSD installed or still HDD? What’s your CPU?

1 Like
5 
$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            15Gi       3.1Gi       5.2Gi       217Mi       7.4Gi        12Gi
Swap:          8.0Gi          0B       8.0Gi
6

The machine has a 1TB HDD.

From -fpaste : * CPU Model (grep ‘model name’ /proc/cpuinfo | awk -F: ‘{print $2}’ | uniq -c |
sed -re ‘s/^ +//’ ):
4 Intel(R) Core™ i3-6100U CPU @ 2.30GHz

7

I edited your post to use preformatted text for the free output. The </> button.

I agree with you the system is using little memory.