50% ram usage at boot

[FilipAleksander]

Hi, I switched to manjaro, KDE, not long ago, from windows, and I’m trying to do the same stuff that i’ve been doing on windows, i don’t have much open, just Discord, Firefox and VSCode, and i noticed that the system gets really laggy with those 3 open, and i’ve seen it reach 99% of ram used.

Then i started investigating and i’ve seen that at boot, as soon as i log in 50% of ram is already being used. This is nothing strange, i knew windows was using even more without any apps opened, and i know if the ram is free to use my pc can use it to run smoothly. But in windows i didn’t get any kind of lag even with the memory (that never actually reached manjaro’s levels) being used by the 3 programs i had usually opened.

I have no idea why, but manjaro doesn’t do anything to reduce it’s use in ram usage when i open new programs, it just slaps the program on top of the ram without ever reducing the amount it takes for itself, is that solvable? I would love to continue using manjaro but if this cannot be resolved i’ll be forced to go back on windows.

I’m a linux noob, so if you need more info please post the commands that i should use to give them. Thanks

[Nachlese]

Windows has got what is called a “pagefile” - to supplement RAM.
The equivalent in Linux is swap - a swap file or a swap partition.
Do you have that?
If not: create a swap file …

[FilipAleksander]

Thank you for the answer, tbh i was baffled that it didn’t create one when installing linux.

I googled swap for manjaro and using the free command it didn’t show there, so after googling how to create a swap partition, i did it, and it works very well! Now when i have all 3 programs open i’m using onlu 60% of ram in total. and at boot i only use around 30%. Great improvement.

[toomanyjoints69]

Thats awesome!