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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Abnormally high ram usage on idle (NixOS) (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My computer over the last week has (after using the computer for a few hours) shown very high ram usage, around 50 - 60% out of 32GB, even though nothing in htop appears to be the culprit with the highest consumer being Firefox at 1.6% ram, even in a tty, around half of my ram is being used up even though no process shows over 0.1% ram. Rebooting does seem to work, but I'd prefer not to every few hours. Do you think it might be an issue with hardware? I did build my pc so perhaps something's broken?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does that include the buffer/cache memory usage?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How would I find this out?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Run free -m and look at the output. That will tell you how much memory is used by programs, how much is being used as cache, and how much is available. The memory used as cache will be freed if a program needs it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           32032       20961        2048         464        9022       10152
Swap:           2048         138        1909

Here's the output

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Something's using a lot of memory. It's not just buffer/cache memory. That's definitely not normal.

Did it just recently start using that much memory? I would suspect that something has a memory leak.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ah ok, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Are you using zfs?