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?
Compared to Windows NT, Linux is famous for using spare pages for cache, and reporting relatively high RAM usage, which is not directly related to the working sets used by processes. It also (I think NT also does this) pre-zeroes unused pages during idle CPU time, so they can be allocated to processes faster on demand.
There’s probably no problem. And as the other commenter mentions, if you dig down into the reporting, you can figure out how much is actually going to processes.
It just that games sometimes crash my computer if 100% ram is being used
Do you not have a swap partition/file?