this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
349 points (97.8% liked)

linuxmemes

25402 readers
815 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
  • Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
  • 5. πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ Language/язык/Sprache
  • This is primarily an English-speaking community. πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡¦πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
  • Comments written in other languages are allowed.
  • The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
  • Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
  • 6. (NEW!) Regarding public figuresWe all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
  • Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
  • We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
  • Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed.
  • Β 

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!


    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.

    founded 2 years ago
    MODERATORS
     

    Possibly related:

    screen shot of memory usage by app, showing Firefox using over 18GB of RAM

    I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.

    top 50 comments
    sorted by: hot top controversial new old
    [–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

    Many people who don't know what they're talking about in this thread. No, used memory does not include cached memory. You can confirm this trivially by running free -m and adding up the numbers (used + cached + free = total). Used memory can not be reclaimed until the process holding it frees it or dies. Not all cached memory can be reclaimed either, which is why the kernel reports an estimate of available memory. That's the number that really matters, because aside from some edges cases that's the number that determines whether you're out of memory or not.

    Anyway the fact that you can't run Linux with 16GB is weird and indicates that some software you are using has a RAM leak (a Firefox extension perhaps?). Firefox will use memory if it's there but it's designed to cope with low memory as well, it just unloads tabs quicker so you have to reload often. There are also extensions that make tab unloading more aggressive, maybe that would help - especially if there's memory pressure from other processes too.

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 11 hours ago

    Yeah the cache as part of used memory theory didn't stack up. This comment (sorry, Lemmy probably doesn't handle the link well) showed 54GB in use, 30GB cached, and 13GB available. 54+12 = 67GB total so cached doesn't seem to be counted as in use since it should be counted as free (mostly).

    In the end, I'm pretty sure it's a memory hog website. It kept filling up until GNOME crashed and I lost my progress (I was trying to order prints for 1000 photos on a horrible website that made me change settings one photo at a time, and the longer I took the more RAM filled up).

    Anyway the fact that you can’t run Linux with 16GB is weird

    I mean, it runs fine. It's more how I'm using it. Firefox 4GB, Element 1GB, Signal 1GB, Beeper 1GB, Steam 2GB, Joplin 1GB. That's all just open and idle (chats and Steam don't even have windows, just background) and are the minimum I would have open at any point. That's already 10GB. By the time I open a couple of windows in a Jetbrains IDE or a particularly demanding website and suddenly it's suffocating.

    [–] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 11 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

    I have a memory consumption issue with Ubuntu, because I stupidly set up the system to have 0 swap. This means under high memory pressure, the entire system could suddenly crash.

    To be fair, Windows isn't a shining beacon either because whenever I attempt something very GPU intensive like running local LLMs the GPU overheats in a split second before the fans have time to spin up and the entire system shuts down.

    [–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

    Just enable zram. It's super easy to set up too.

    [–] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 hours ago

    How do I do that?

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

    How does that happen? Shouldn't the GPU and CPU have thermal throttling so even under intense loads it just slows down to keep temps down?

    When I play games on my laptop the integrated graphics are at 100% most of the time but it doesn't cause the system to crash.

    [–] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

    So the system is a gaming laptop which might explain things. The CPU has liquid metal for cooling and a lower TDP so it's fine. Whereas the GPU has a higher TGP and if ran hard draws like 120W. If the GPU fans are not already on this quickly overwhelming the GPU thermally.

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 10 minutes ago

    Weird. If I was going to saturate my GPU, I'd pick an intensive game. Seems odd that a gaming laptop might get overwhelmed and shut off if a game is too intensive? Or is is something special about LLMs that make it the Archilles' heel?

    [–] Jhex@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)

    many Linux distros are optimized to use as much available RAM as possible, free RAM is wasted RAM

    Most would still run with a lot less anyway

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

    Mine was definitely not handling 16GB...

    [–] Jhex@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

    what do you mean? not working well with 16 gb??

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 7 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

    Correct. If I had a lot of stuff open (I like to keep stuff open for when I get back to it) then the whole system was slow and would sometimes lock up completely. I needed to close things to keep it stable.

    [–] Jhex@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

    something is wrong. I have a gaming rig I also use for work, it has 16GB on it and I have never strugled running anything

    I dont know what you mean by a lot but i normally have 10 sites opened (including ms 365 garbage), teams, omnissa client, a few specs usually PDFs, signal, deezer all running on Hyprland and it runs smooth like butter

    [–] Hugin@lemmy.world 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

    Linux isn't going to help much when the applications are using a lot ram. Firefox is an absolute ram hog linux or windows. Linux is just going to use less of the ram for it self.

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 16 hours ago

    Oh the applications sure were using a lot of RAM, I can't deny that.

    [–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 1 day ago (6 children)
    load more comments (6 replies)
    [–] bigboismith@lemmy.world 150 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Hey, unused memory is wasted memory

    load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] Ozonowsky@lemmy.world 79 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

    every chat app might use ~1GB because most of them are electron apps, which all spawn their own instance of chromium

    [–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    I love how out of every single graphics backend option they chose the chromium Chrome is known for not slowing down after 3 tabs.

    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] crt0o@lemm.ee 102 points 1 day ago (10 children)

    Solution: if you only have 4GB ram, nothing can use more than 4GB

    [–] truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 47 points 1 day ago (10 children)

    It absolutely will try, it just gets killed by the oom reaper.

    load more comments (10 replies)
    load more comments (9 replies)
    [–] Killer57@lemmy.ca 7 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (5 children)

    18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb (30gb is the normal load I see after browser restart) 18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb

    [–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 10 hours ago

    I don't know if this is something to brag about, it seems more like something isn't working right...

    Browser restart means without any tabs? If so that is some concern

    [–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 12 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

    What are you doing to poor Firefox?

    [–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 18 hours ago

    Firefox with an inflation fetish

    [–] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 20 hours ago

    How do you do this? I usually have about 2k open tabs and my firefox uses a fraction of that.

    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com 77 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

    It's already been explained elsewhere, but the cache can be free, as needed - that's how linux works.
    There's 57+ GB available ram, yet.

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

    Yip, got that now. I misunderstood, as it's different to Windows, which shows cached memory as free since it's available to apps as needed.

    [–] Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

    You could probably configure your system monitor to show available memory - that is memory available given that cache can be dropped - rather than free memory that should always be as close to zero as possible.

    [–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 13 hours ago

    Well in a turn of events, the stupid photo printing website I was using just kept filling RAM up until it was full then GNOME crashed me back to the login page.

    [–] mvirts@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    Don't be confused by cached ram, be confused by the oom killer activating while you have plenty of swap and for some reason it kills the shell you ran Firefox from.

    If you want to go on a memory allocation adventure try disabling memory overcommit πŸ₯²

    [–] nixigaj@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

    systemd-oomd with its memory pressure model never really worked for me, even after configuring it to be fairly aggressive. My system still irreversibly locks up the second the memory and swap touches 100%. earlyoom with its more primitive model works much better and actually kills processes before the memory and swap hits the ceiling. Combine this with a 2x RAM size swap file and desktop Linux is finally as stable as Windows and macOS. It is just a shame that distros do not configure generous, dynamically growing, swap files and a good oom killer by default, and you have to discover this fundamental problem of the Linux kernel yourself on multiple different devices before realizing what you actually need to do to fix these random freezes.

    load more comments (3 replies)
    [–] cloudless@piefed.social 36 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Does it mean 35.1 GB out of the 44.3 GB is actually cached? Then you have quite low actual RAM usage considering you have 67 GB.

    load more comments (3 replies)
    load more comments
    view more: next β€Ί