This is bullshit. I wanted to play Terraria last night but I looked at my RAM usage and it was sitting uncomfortably high at 13 GB (of my 15). So, I close Terraria, and it drops about 2 GB. I close Firefox, Thunderbird, and Zed, and that drops about 2.5 GB. Then I close basically everything and it’s still super high! Each time this happens, I have to restart my computer in order to get the RAM usage lower.

Whenever I look this up it’s usually two camps:

  • KDE is just bloated.
  • Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

To address both of these:

I disabled a few things in KDE like file indexing (which was my home directory). Cool, so that saved like 100 MB. KDE is supposed to idle at around 3GB anyways, so what now?

The “unused RAM” belief is like a folktale at this point. It’s not true anymore, and buffered/cache memory is shown separately. Plus, I can drop those caches whenever I want… Which I did. File inode cache only really became a problem for me when I was doing Minecraft Datapack development and I was creating hundreds of files on a regular basis as part of hot reload. Then I’d have to drop the entire cache because it wasn’t being free’d…

However, the RAM I’m complaining about is actually not that, because it steps on my available RAM meter. Having a game freeze up because I was out of memory is a pain in the ass.

I even tried installing Zram, which only made matters worse since the active memory allocations seemed to be robbing the CPU of time it would be running game code, just so it could compress file pages. (My system has also just had major lag problems with swap, in general, during high memory pressure, which I should probably report as a bug). My swappiness was probably way too high, but regardless I didn’t see major improvements from that and it only seemed like a bandaid to the real problem. Also, why should I need to use swap when I have 16 GB of RAM and only a few programs open at a time?

This whole thing is pretty annoying. Whenever I have like 11 hours of uptime my memory is unusually high. I also can’t seem to track it down to any particular application…

  • HouseWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    0·
    2 hours ago

    You apparently can limit programs memory cap using cgroups. I haven’t tried it however.

    Wouldn’t be the first…or 5th time I’ve seen Minecraft max out ram.

    Me and some friends managed to crash a guys 64Gig server rack because the modpack my friend made had a bad memory leak.

  • Taasz/Woof@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 hours ago

    What processes were using all the ram? I’m curious if there was one huge one or if nothing seemed to be the culprit specifically.

  • castironfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    Use something like ps to list out what is using the RAM

    You mention you closed Firefox and it didn’t change but you did not say how you actually measured it.

    Start the system up fresh and run this command.

    ps faux --sort=-%mem

    Or

    ps faux --sort=-rss

    That will help you track down what is actually using it.

    Note: browsers will soak up a ton of memory on modern systems as almost all of them sandbox tabs at this point. If you open a ton of tabs, that will be half your problem.

  • Zen_Shinobi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 hours ago

    Specs?

    Terraria is hardly resource friendly. What were you doing on FF, livestreaming?

    Installing zram seems to me you have low end specs. You need a lightweight DE

  • Björn@swg-empire.deEnglish
    0·
    4 hours ago

    I’m in the unused RAM is wasted RAM camp. Unless I run into problems I don’t care about memory usage. So in your case I would’ve kept playing unless I got constant stutters.

    And I think KDE is surprisingly light. Especially compared to older versions.

  • Ricky Rigatoni@piefed.zipEnglish
    0·
    4 hours ago

    “Unused ram is wasted ram” is the worst argument I ever heard because that ram is so I can run MORE THAN ONE PROGRAM instead of some SHITASS WEB BROWSER taking all of it.

    If I wanted to go back to the days before multitasking OSes when all ram was taken up by one program cuz you could only run one I’d install FreeDOS. Sick of this shit.

    • castironfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 hours ago

      That saying is because “unused RAM” is RAM that is not being used for buffers or cache.

      That RAM is quickly freed for applications when it’s requested.

      • Ricky Rigatoni@piefed.zipEnglish
        0·
        3 hours ago

        You’re gonna have to point me in a direction that explains this concept to me. I haven’t picked up an A+ certification book since 2012.

        • castironfan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 hours ago

          Someone posted this earlier and it’s a good explanation

          https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

          Here is an Ug level explanation if you want something shorter:

          Disk slow, memory fast (even compared to an SSD)

          If memory fast, why no use memory

          Some things load from disk often but slow to wait. Load from disk in advance and keep in memory so fast. Now use memory better.

          If not enough memory we let go of other thing to run program.

          How work? Magic.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      0·
      2 hours ago

      I am too. Why not use your ram, you paid for it. Else you’re writing to slow files and and caching things. I’d gladly have everything I need in ram if it fits.

      What I’m more concerned about is applications releasing ram when I need it back. If I start a game will the browser give back the ram? That’s my only concern though

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 hours ago

    You should use zwap with swappiness 100 if you want zram + swap. You can also enable and configure systemd-oomd (out of memory demon) if you actually run out of memory at times - it goes about things smarter than the kernel (for example killing processes that wait on memory all the time).

  • thingsiplay@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    5 hours ago

    Sounds like a memory leak. Is it really KDE? Maybe its the browser or some kind of service running in the background. If memory got leaked out of the app, that it doesn’t matter if you close the app or not, because those are ghost memory now. I had this issue with a local Ai program just yesterday. It doesn’t matter if I close everything, somehow the memory usage shows high amount; because a software leaked and it was not KDE, as this was reproducable.

    My point is. you might not know where this leak come from without careful analyzing it. You can’t just conclude its KDEs fault because you don’t know why this happens. You should investigate which program does that.

  • Not a newt@piefed.caEnglish
    0·
    6 hours ago

    buffered/cached memory shows separately

    Some of it does. Let’s try an experiment: does the reported amount of used memory drop if you run the following command?

    sudo sh -c 'echo 3 >  /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'

    (obligatory don’t blindly trust commands from strangers, type them out instead of copy/pasting, yaddayadda)

    • 2ndDegreeOWO@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 hours ago

      That’s just because ZFS’s disc cache shows up as application-used memory, instead of disc cache memory. (Disc cache memory is often reported in system monitor tools as ‘free’ memory, because it can be freed up as soon as you need it. ZFS’s disc cache works the same way, but it’s not reported separately to the OS, so that makes it look like ZFS is using a shitload of RAM.) If it bothers you, you can set a maximum amount of RAM for ZFS to use, and that will clear it up. It will mean that your performance is slightly worse, though, because ZFS won’t be able to use disc caching optimally.

  • Matt The Horwood@lemmy.horwood.cloudEnglish
    0·
    6 hours ago

    I would kill all Firefox processes and see if it’s a memory leak, also free -mh will show you what’s in use. Most nix systems will have a load of memory in caches