This is from a fresh boot of the system, except sshd I have not started anything else. ram consumption used to be just 126-200 mb now it has jumped so significantly that I am concerned I might have unnecessarily bloated my system:

I intend to use the system as a local server with an optional fully featured WM(Hyprland which is installed, but this screenshot was taken before it was loaded) for occasional use.

Ram conservation is a top priority and I would like to know if such a big jump in usage is normal or are there is something wrong with my system config

      • eneff@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        2 months ago

        I meant like in general…

        I do agree it’s worth investigating if it happens again. My best guess so far would be some kind of data written to a tmpfs. That’d explain it not being associated with a particular process, yet counting towards actual used RAM.

  • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    It’s allocated memory in the cache. It’s not used, it’s earmarked for first usage.

    This is standard memory management.

    • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      2 months ago

      I’m pretty sure only the yellow bar on the right of that indicator is cache. Green is actually being used by processes.

  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
    2·
    2 months ago

    You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

    But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

  • m4m4m4m4@lemmy.world
    31·
    2 months ago

    If you can live without Networkmanager, I’d disable it and move your network setup to a static ip. Networkmanager can hog resources.

  • DreamButt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    When you want to turn it on, instead unplug it and go start a farm. Problem solved, requires zero ram

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    21·
    2 months ago

    free -m and slabtop output.

    I don’t know when you had a clean boot using only 200MB, but it wasn’t in the past few years with what you’re running there.

    Anyway, with half your RAM still available, things are more than fine. Make sure you have swap enabled, and you won’t get OOMKill situations that tear things down.