My system’s non-cached memory usage is too high. It doesn’t make any sense even after summing up all the applications memory usages.
I feel the suspect is AMD GPU GTT super high memory usage.
(I also have full disk encryption)
(32GB total system RAM)
EDIT:
Sometimes the the screen freezes for a few seconds when I’m doing something intensive.
Eg: Frequent screen freezes (for a couple of sec) when I’m screen recording using OBS.
Eg2: When the automatic crash reporting tool runs in KDE plasma, high memory usage by that tool resulted in crashes, a lot of times.
Just curious - is there any particular issue related to high memory utilization ? If not, why worry ? ((C) Dire Straits)
These days OS tends to utilize abundance of RAM for cashing making your system more responsive and fast. It is good that resources we obtain for our hard earned money are utilized. Would use of, say, 4GB of 28 GB of your RAM make you happier ?
Thanks for the reply. Yes, there are issues - The screen freezes for couple of seconds when I’m doing something intensive. I’ve included this now in my original post.
But not in my case, since most of the memory usage is from Non-cache memory.
Which I have now (edited and) emphasized in my OP.
It’s true that generally Linux will use plenty of cached memory. However, from the screenshot in the OP, that doesn’t seem to be the only thing happening here.
I had a look at top on my F42 KDE system and compared it with the KDE System Monitor. The “Used” figure in the system monitor GUI corresponds to the “used” figure in top - the GUI isn’t including what top shows as “buff/cache”.
So if OP sees “21.8 GiB used” in the KDE System Monitor GUI, then top is also going to show something like “21 used”.
This caught me out at first! The [quote] tags have to be on their own line, you can’t inline the text directly before and after them without a line break.
If user space programs like floorp have a memory leak, it would be visible in system monitor and top. smem -kw output shows something unsual about the kernel space utilization.
12GB non-cached usage in kernel dynamic memory is what I’m worried about.
I’m 100% sure that the CPU, network, and GPU are not the culprit. I’m not sure about I/O though.
But I’m very certain that, during all the crashes and freezes, memory utilization is almost full.
Why are you using Floorp? A quick search says it’s Firefox ESR: Why not use that?
I suspect Floorp as a Firefox ESR fork is probably doing something Firefox doesn’t do to use more RAM (could be mem leak, Floorp deciding to cache everything to RAM for speed, gfx-side bug on old lib causing VRAM use to multiply, etc).
I’d look at private bytes and other memory usage. Bun (Node.js alternate) I’ve seen using 4GB visibly + 21GB private bytes, both way outside of anything normal (regular Node is like 500MB). In that case I just switched the software (back to Node ).
Try running this: free -h
and posting the results here. It will give us a good idea how much memory you really have available. And, top has a column listing the %mem used by each process; are any of them higher than you’d expect?
Thanks for your reply. Please check the first image in the original post, there should be free -h output at the bottom.
top’s output is just userspace programs, nothing unusual at all, and doesn’t add up to the total non-cached memory utilization. But the kernel utilization from smem -kw is highly abnormal.
You could try to search for the term “linux kernel dynamic memory details” in your favorite search engine.
The space uses be the zram swap space will show up indirectly as non-cached memory. If you have big files in the /tmp directory, it might also be counted as non-cached.
Once your system starts using a lot of swap space in means you have the preverbial “too many irons in the fire” (look it up).
Just an anecdotal data point, but I also use Floorp as my main browser on a system with 32 GB of RAM (nVidia GPU in my case, not AMD). I’ve never had any memory problems like this. The “Used” number in the KDE System Monitor rarely goes above 16 GB for me.
I usually don’t have a large number of open tabs, but I do use the browser all day long, so it would be surprising if some big memory leak in Floorp was the cause of this.
).