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I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.
Hey, unused memory is wasted memory
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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If you got it, flaunt it.
If by "unused" you mean not actively storing data, then the Linux kernel docs disagree.
Solution: if you only have 4GB ram, nothing can use more than 4GB
It absolutely will try, it just gets killed by the oom reaper.
Unless you have the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl set to 2, and your overcommit is set to less than your system memory.
Then, when an application requests more memory than you have available, it will just get an error instead of needing to be killed by OOM when it attempts to use the memory at a later time.
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I had one stick of 16GB and it was not enough. I was going to get a second stick, but said screw it and got two 32GB (it's a laptop and only has two slots).
How does that even happen ππ I have 2x8gb, usually have teams open, Firefox, telegram, a virtual machine with windows 10, a few IDEs and it usually only takes 10-12gb max mostly due to the vm requiring flat 8 gigs
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/swapfile joined the chat
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every chat app might use ~1GB because most of them are electron apps, which all spawn their own instance of chromium
I love how out of every single graphics backend option they chose the chromium Chrome is known for not slowing down after 3 tabs.
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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.
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.
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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
Mine was definitely not handling 16GB...
what do you mean? not working well with 16 gb??
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.
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.
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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.
Oh good question. Now I'm wondering. 44+35 is bigger than the 67GB I have, but normally I would expect pretty much all the RAM to hold cached data, where some is also marked as free in case a process needs it.
Can someone explain this memory screen, as your question has raised many more for me!
βCacheβ means space used for disk caching. Itβs free to be used for processes as needed, but the system consumes idle RAM until then to speed things up, so itβs technically not βfreeβ, even though it isnβt used by system processes. In Linux, used - cache gives you the actual consumption by processes.
Thanks, someone else also mentioned this. Cached is considered used in Linux, where as in Windows it's considered free since applications can use it if they need it even though it holds data.
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.
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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 π₯²
If you're out of ram and using swap thats when the oom killer should be killing. Swap is not ram.
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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.
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.
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~19 Gb firefox
Tf you doing
The about:processes page doesn't even add up close to that:
Then it's just a bug I guess
Or someone is getting very rich in bitcoin right now
Someone else pointed out cached RAM is shown as used in Linux, so Firefox is probably showing actual usage and the process list probably includes the RAM cached for Firefox.
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oh i see you're also using a single tab for youtube and no other tabs
Most RAM Linux reports as in used is actually used as disc cache to speed up the IO.
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Windows shows memory used for cache as free. Linux per default shows it as used.
Try free -m
Also I would disable swap, it is no longer 2004.
It is also used for system suspend.
Disabling swap will prevent a system from suspending, which might be fine, but I use it.
And swap isn't some ancient relic. Sure, my 32GB desktop barely uses it, but my home server benefits greatly from having 64GB of swap in addition to 16GB of physical memory. It may not need to use much more than 16GB at any one time, but shit runs a lot better using a giant SSD swap with how many services I run.
System config is case by case, not "current year".
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18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb (30gb is the normal load I see after browser restart) 
How do you do this? I usually have about 2k open tabs and my firefox uses a fraction of that.
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I had a power surge last night, desktop didn't even flinch.
every chat app needs over a gig of ram to itself for "developer productivity"
Me when I load some big matrices
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