this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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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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[–] Krtek@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hate that this is the default answer to these questions, most tools by which less tech savy have detrmined that something is using a lot of ram are accounting for buffers and don't subtract it from the free space. Every time when I clicked on someones post (well on Reddit, here its the first one) regarding their ram usage being high and this website was posted, it was not the buffer/cache. So while it is obviosly important to get to know how OP determined that something was using a lot of ram, directly assuming that they read it wrong is imo simply not helpful and in most cases just more confusing

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

You're right. In this comment they specified that games crash when the RAM fills, so it most probably isn't just buffer/cache.

I assumed that it was buffer/cache since they mentioned that it doesn't show any process using that much RAM. Next time I'll ask if the high RAM usage has any negative effect, to make sure.