I have installed KDE spin of Fedora on my laptop and I notice quite high memory usage. It’s not currently a big deal as I have 32Gb of memory installed in this machine but just surprised that it gets so high. I have thunderbird open with seems to use a lot of Ram and also Chrome which surprisingly doesn’t show it’s ram usage. Does anyone know why?
Here are some of the same results using top from command line:
Is this normal and how does it compare with other people’s ram usage?
People who ask this question generally refuse to accept the answer. I hope this time is an exception.
The memory use is perfectly normal. Nothing is wrong.
Most of the memory use shown by top is for cache. There is nothing wasteful about using even far more than that for cache and you absolutely should not do anything to restrict that default behavior.
I don’t really understand how what System Monitor shows can be consistent with what top shows. I really don’t know why Chrome shows that way. But, given the top output I’m still confident that the memory use is not a problem. Maybe System Monitor is showing simply wrong information (maybe, but not all that likely). Maybe the information it shows has very different meaning what what you (or I) would expect it to mean.
So if you were worried System Monitor were defective and/or in serious need of a better explanation, I hope someone who knows more than I do about it explains.
But if you are worried about the actual memory use, you shouldn’t.
In System Monitor, the Memory use of my web browser (firefox) also doesn’t show, while the other lines all have memory use.
So are you saying that system monitor is reporting memory used by apps but also system cache?
The reason I am monitoring this is that I once had KDE installed many years ago on a 4 gigabyte machine and it would often crash at the end of the day after being on for several hours. I found at that time both Chrome and Thunderbird were heavy ram users but I suspect that all my swap was being used up or a large portion of it and this happened even if that machine was sitting idle. On this particular machine I erased the OS and installed Zorin Lite and the problem seemed to go away so I’m just curious as to whether KDE has internally a lot higher ram requirements that may not be being reported by system monitor.
On my current machine I have yet to run into any issues like that but I am keeping it running to see how high it can go. Currently it takes two days to 8 GB.
So in summary I am not claiming Linux is eating my ram but I wonder if Google Chrome or something else is.
I have certainly seen web browsers continuously grow in memory use (while certain webpages were open) and the only way to release the memory was to close the whole web browser. I haven’t seen it recently, but I don’t still go to the web pages that had the problem, so I don’t know whether the problem is fixed vs. I’m not encountering it.
I don’t think what you showed looks like that.
I don’t understand what System Monitor is reporting on your system (nor on my own). Much more than 8GB is in use if you count cache and enough less if you don’t count cache that I can’t explain your 7.9GiB report.
I was looking at top to claim confidence that it all looks normal.
Modern browser is like an OS with its own task manager, see Shift+Esc in Google Chrome.
