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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Abnormally high ram usage on idle (NixOS) (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It just that games sometimes crash my computer if 100% ram is being used

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Do you not have a swap partition/file?