I left my old desktop running since May 7, and just noticed that it was very noisy. I managed to ssh into it and found that it had used the 16gig of memory and 16 gig of swap.
When I left it running, I had a bunch of firefox windows running and top showed various “Web Content” processes consuming 15-17% of memory. Once I killed these the fan stopped, but I was left with the highest memory usage.
xfwm4 using 13.5% of memory and 2.1g in the RES column on top.
This is xfwm4 version 4.16.1 (revision 5f61a84ad) for Xfce 4.16
Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Compiled against GTK+-3.24.24, using GTK+-3.24.29.
Build configuration and supported features:
- Startup notification support: Yes
- XSync support: Yes
- Render support: Yes
- Xrandr support: Yes
- Xpresent support: Yes
- X Input 2 support: No
- Embedded compositor: Yes
- Epoxy support: Yes
- KDE systray proxy (deprecated): No
if you leave content open, it’s running & won’t release what ever it’s using back to the system. xfwm4 is the window manager, it’s going to be involved with what ever is running & if the process doesn’t close or is constantly changing(web content) of course the memory is going to climb.