It is if the memory is held by the kernel for caching or buffering. Is it using an in memory swap file? If that’s even possible, I’m not sure.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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zram is in-memory swap, but it's compressed/decompressed on the fly, so it shouldn't take up a ton of room, and certainly not at idle.
I have no idea how that GUI thing measures memory usage, but if you run top in a terminal, it'll show free, used by programs, and buffer/cache separately.
Sort the application in the bottom half of that window by memory and share the screenshot. What else is open?
here is images of sys monitor and htop let me know if you find anything unusual https://ibb.co/RQfKNZK https://ibb.co/sRWbT94
Could you sort the SYS monitor by "Memory" please? You have it currently sorted by "Downloaded".
As for htop, could you hide threads? Hitting "h" should do it, IIRC.
🤔 Nothing looks suspicious there besides easy effects. No idea what that is. Since you're seeing programs of your own user and not that of the system, there might be services running besides yours.
Could you try running sudo htop, hiding threads, and sorting by memory?
One additional programming you can run is ps_mem. Try running sudo ps_mem after installing it and either screenshotting or copy pasting the result result here.
P.S you can explore a more detailed system monitor in KDE by hitting Ctrl+ESC(ape). It will open ksysguard. I'm on mobile now, but maybe that can also be opened in root with ksudo ksysguard. But the output of ps_mem should be more helpful.
Easy effects is an audio equalizer software and this is ps_mem results: https://rentry.org/7obq4y56 edit: it's seems system monitor and neofetch report 1.5GB but htop and ps_mem report <1GB
It is curious that the system monitor and neofetch are reporting the same value while ps_mem and htop aren't. But those internals unknown to me, but my guess would be different methods of calculating shared memory. You can look up that term if you like. I haven't grasped it.
Private memory seems to be physical RAM usage.
The only candidates for less memory usage are probably
- baloo: file indexer for faster searches in KDE apps. If you don't search files or text often (or at all), might as well deactivate it in KDE system settings
- smbd: mounts SMB drives (remote filesystem's) I think. Do you do that? If not, you might as well uninstall it
The gains would be small though (~40-50MB?). Up to you.
Also surprisingly the DiscoverNotifier uses nearly as much RAM as plasmashell? That's the update notifier. No idea how to disable it nor if you want to. Just think that it's a little much for its task.
40-50mb is hardly worthwhile considering I also use SMB and occasionally search for apps and files, I don't really know what using other 1gb because plasmashell and all of the system services only use <800mb edit: I installed gnome task manager and I saw 600mb caches
I saw this the other day on my computer, then I checked and most of it was system monitor, so I think it was just a memory leak or something
If you have steam open yea
I don't have steam open
No