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I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.
18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb (30gb is the normal load I see after browser restart) 
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Wait, everyone is saying cached is part of the used memory but yours shows more cached than in use?
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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.
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https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Electron apps are bullshit though.
This site says Linux calls cached RAM "free" but in my screen shot it's definitely being shown as "used". I guess this is a choice of this app?
Most likely, try running htop or top (can't remember which is which) in a terminal.
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It do be like that
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
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.
If you're out of ram and using swap thats when the oom killer should be killing. Swap is not ram.
Unless you use zram. Compressing pages is pretty useful as an intermediate stage.
The swap is zram in this case.
oh i see you're also using a single tab for youtube and no other tabs
Me when I load some big matrices
Most RAM Linux reports as in used is actually used as disc cache to speed up the IO.
Well having 64GB RAM has been a huge boost to how fast everything feels so this checks out.
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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.
Ah that makes sense.
I had a power surge last night, desktop didn't even flinch.
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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