<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div>I think maybe you're looking at this the wrong way -- what use is having a lot of ram if it's not going to be used? This is how the kernel and some userspace programs think about it.<br></div><div><br></div><div>When you look at memory usage, how much is actually in use vs cache? Cache is the yellow part of the bar in Htop. If there's just a bunch of cache used, this is normal as the kernel isn't really going to drop cache unless there's a reason to, and it will do so automatically when more memory is needed by anything; thus, you shouldn't really look at cache memory as "in use".<br></div><div><br></div><div>As for Chrome and possibly Firefox, they use a lot of RAM, yes, however they also somehow tell the OOM killer to kill their processes first in the even of an OOM condition. Here's a description of how this is handled in ChromiumOS however I imagine it's the same in regular Linux: <a href="https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/out-of-memory-handling">https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/out-of-memory-handling</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>Therefore, unless random programs start getting killed left and right, I personally wouldn't worry about it.<br></div><div><br></div><div>On Fri, Nov 6, 2020, at 7:48 AM, Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><div dir="ltr"><div>Memory usage is getting frustrating for me, as whether I use 64gb of ram, or 128gb, I still tend to exhaust memory on my system. My laptop currently has 64gb, and started freaking out this morning, to find I was hitting oom's again with browsing and some general use as wake up.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Trying to figure out with htop what is using all my memory, firefox was a big consumer, using ~25gb of ram once killed. Yeah, it's like that. Chrome was typically worse. I use 6 profiles, as I have to for different companies I consult for, mostly due to different gsuite accounts and different o365 accounts that will not play nice in a same profile. Same for Chrome. I figure I can't be the only person that does this, perhaps so, but the memory utilization with with only a few tabs on each is astounding.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I tend to run several VM's at a time, a full instance of windoze10 or two with 4-8gb of ram work fine.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I use pluma text editor a lot as the gedit fork from mint, which I'll find uses 3-4gb of memory with a few dozen text files open. Of text. Doesn't seem to be worth a few gig of ram.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Libreoffice itself tends to use 3-4gb of memory keeping a dozen or two files open, which again flipping between several customers, I tend to work on, review, etc constantly.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Even on boot, kde tends to use ~3.5gb of memory, and after running for a few week or two, with everything else killed, will start consuming ~9gb with nothing else running. No idea where it goes.<br></div><div><br></div><div>My question is how the heck do others run linux with only 4-8gb of ram on a "normal" system? Most linux users are likely IT professionals like myself, just curious what the heck I'm doing wrong.<br></div><div><br></div><div>-mb<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div>---------------------------------------------------<br></div><div>PLUG-discuss mailing list - <a href="mailto:PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org">PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org</a><br></div><div>To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:<br></div><div><a href="https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss">https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss</a><br></div></blockquote><div><br></div></body></html>