Yes, use an AUR helper, such as: yay, trizen, paru…
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A usual combination for me is
sudo pacman -Syu && paru -Sua
Though it may be worth noting that some of these helpers rely on their own history to check for updates.
So you may wish to feed all foreign packages to any new aur helper first; ex
Updates and AUR requisites:
sudo pacman -Syu git base-devel
Install, ex paru (manual AUR build):
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -sric
Feed all foreign packages to helper:
paru -S $(pacman -Qmq)
Now, for daily or common ‘regular updates then AUR updates’ see the first section of this post.
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I have this exact problem. Pamac fills up all the RAM and SWAP and makes Gnome crash. The only way to avoid it is to kill the process.
I have tried to follow the advice you all give in this post but it doesn’t solve the problem for me. I still have to figure out how to stop pamac from running periodically, but my main problem is that I can’t use pacman normally either.
When I try to follow your advice I get the following errors, preventing me from installing paru.
...
error: target not found: libalpm.so>=14-64
==> ERROR: 'pacman' failed to install missing dependencies.
...
==> ERROR: Could not resolve all dependencies.
I have read other posts and they talked about mirrors, even the firewall. Well, my firewall doesn’t seem to be affecting (or so I think), while the mirrors have been reset and reassigned.
If this is the case, wouldn’t it be better not to use pamac and manage everything with pacman instead?
paru is an AUR package and you are apparently using the Stable branch, which is behind.
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Great, I changed to unstable branch and it worked. Thank you!
I cannot tell you what is better and what not - this is your prerogative - your choice - your experience.
Personally I work largely without pamac - sometimes I want a gui search - but that has become rare.
The console and a virtual terminal is my primary lowlevel integration with the system.
I imagine many people (myself included) prefer that option.
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There’s a reason why many experienced users here do exactly that… but I’m not going to reopen that can of worms again, it’s been discussed previously many times.
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That was actually a genuine question because of my lack of experience. As I see a consensus in your comments I will do the same and use pacman instead. 
Back to the thread, I think it’s important to mention that when I switched to unstable branch the RAM/SWAP consumption problem was solved. Now I’m back to the stable branch and everything is still fine.
I don’t know what could have caused that problem, but somehow changing mirrors solved it.