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.
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".
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:
https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/out-of-memory-handling
Therefore, unless random programs start getting killed left and right, I personally wouldn't worry about it.
On Fri, Nov 6, 2020, at 7:48 AM, Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> I tend to run several VM's at a time, a full instance of windoze10 or two with 4-8gb of ram work fine.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> -mb
>
>
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