This is bullshit. I wanted to play Terraria last night but I looked at my RAM usage and it was sitting uncomfortably high at 13 GB (of my 15). So, I close Terraria, and it drops about 2 GB. I close Firefox, Thunderbird, and Zed, and that drops about 2.5 GB. Then I close basically everything and it’s still super high! Each time this happens, I have to restart my computer in order to get the RAM usage lower.

Whenever I look this up it’s usually two camps:

  • KDE is just bloated.
  • Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

To address both of these:

I disabled a few things in KDE like file indexing (which was my home directory). Cool, so that saved like 100 MB. KDE is supposed to idle at around 3GB anyways, so what now?

The “unused RAM” belief is like a folktale at this point. It’s not true anymore, and buffered/cache memory is shown separately. Plus, I can drop those caches whenever I want… Which I did. File inode cache only really became a problem for me when I was doing Minecraft Datapack development and I was creating hundreds of files on a regular basis as part of hot reload. Then I’d have to drop the entire cache because it wasn’t being free’d…

However, the RAM I’m complaining about is actually not that, because it steps on my available RAM meter. Having a game freeze up because I was out of memory is a pain in the ass.

I even tried installing Zram, which only made matters worse since the active memory allocations seemed to be robbing the CPU of time it would be running game code, just so it could compress file pages. (My system has also just had major lag problems with swap, in general, during high memory pressure, which I should probably report as a bug). My swappiness was probably way too high, but regardless I didn’t see major improvements from that and it only seemed like a bandaid to the real problem. Also, why should I need to use swap when I have 16 GB of RAM and only a few programs open at a time?

This whole thing is pretty annoying. Whenever I have like 11 hours of uptime my memory is unusually high. I also can’t seem to track it down to any particular application…

System: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed