My idle xfce using 1gb memory

Hello, first of all I am all new to arch base distro’s. I have migrated from deb to arch day before yesterday. After installing manjaro the first thing I did was open task manager then htop. Both of them showed 1.2gb of ram usage where there was no programs opened. I do not have a swap partion I use i3 8gb ram 1gb vram. I previously use to get 300/350 mb memory usage on deb but it is showing too high in manjaro. Please help.

your post is confusing, are you using xfce or i3.
if your checking htop, click the memory section, it’ll line up by use.

Hi @prego.softs, and welcome!

2 things about your post:

  • Just because you don’t see it yourself, doesn’t mean there’s nothing running. Your file indexer (I don’t know if Xfce has something like that) will, especially, be taking up much resources just after installation. There are many other things.
  • RAM (memory) not used, is wasted and pointless. It would have, actually, been a much bigger problem if it tried to use 16GB of your 8GB RAM.

I have 16GB and I just checked, my RAM usage is ~4.7G.

Also, having things in RAM makes your system more snappy, since RAM is much faster than a HDD or SSD.

So relax, there’s nothing wrong, and remember: RAM not used, is RAM wasted.

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Can you post the output of top here ?

OP probably meant Intel i3 processor.

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Take a look here:

https://www.linuxatemyram.com
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yeah, that makes since. was just to tired to realize.
i have xfce4 running on a rpi400, don’t really notice the 4gb ram growing on my setup.
with just firefox open to this forum i’m ±800mb for usage & it drops -300 when i close firefox.

but you know what they say, “unused ram, is wasted ram” linux caches for faster access the next time the app is open.

i just let it do it’s thing, unless it’s causing problems, i see nothing to worry about.

1 Like

The article clears a lot of stuff I didnt even know about linux as I am a newbie thank you. Still I will post the tasks result which might give everyone here a bit of light into whats happening, I will be convinced once the members over here give an “ok” signal after seeing the screenshot

Can you post the output of top here ?

https://ibb.co/kQ6M6bP

like htop, top is a command ran in a terminal
It displays a nice summary of the most important things
memory usage included
it looks like this

top - 06:01:07 up 4 days, 22:32,  1 user,  load average: 0.53, 0.62, 0.86
Tasks: 201 total,   1 running, 200 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  1.2 us,  0.8 sy,  0.0 ni, 97.8 id,  0.0 wa,  0.1 hi,  0.1 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   7847.8 total,   3196.3 free,   1711.5 used,   2940.0 buff/cache
MiB Swap:  10374.2 total,  10269.5 free,    104.8 used.   5410.0 avail Mem 

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                           
 220876 nachlese    20   0  470152  51428  37460 S   2.0   0.6   0:02.70 xfce4-terminal                                                                                    
    815 root      20   0 1012320  65336  34640 S   1.7   0.8 200:09.98 Xorg                                                                                              
 201652 nachlese    20   0 3753280 578192 214420 S   1.3   7.2 100:31.03 firefox                                                                                           
 220518 nachlese    20   0 2826680 276372 149308 S   1.0   3.4   0:32.47 Web Content                                                                                       
   1237 nachlese    20   0  502584  42056  29188 S   0.7   0.5  10:15.69 xfce4-panel                                                                                       
   1167 nachlese    20   0   12964   5700   3908 S   0.3   0.1   3:07.28 dbus-daemon                                                                                       
   1225 nachlese    20   0  790620  50764  31648 S   0.3   0.6  70:34.44 xfwm4                                                                                             
 217555 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.3   0.0   0:02.41 kworker/u8:28-events_power_efficient                                                              
 220186 nachlese    20   0 2890132 316288 156428 S   0.3   3.9   0:19.74 Web Content                                                                                       
 220394 nachlese    20   0 2807572 226928 143316 S   0.3   2.8   0:08.50 Web Content                                                                                       
 220563 nachlese    20   0 2801736 226764 142340 S   0.3   2.8   0:08.02 Web Content                                                                                       
      1 root      20   0  172224  13144   5748 S   0.0   0.2   0:09.77 systemd                                                                                           
      2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.22 kthreadd                                                                                          
      3 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_gp                                                                                            
      4 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_par_gp                                                                                        
      6 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0H-kblockd                                                                              
      8 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 mm_percpu_wq                                                                                      
      9 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_tasks_kthre                                                                                   
     10 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_tasks_rude_                                                                                   
     11 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_tasks_trace

You should start your computer and login without starting programs like Firefox.
And then use top on console.

I have a computer with XFCE as GUI.
When I login (one file manager and one terminal open), I have a memory consumption of 468 MB.

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Well a funny thing happened, first when I was starting my computer and seeing task manager or htop it was showing 1.2gb but now suddenly it came down to 650mb which is acceptable. And I have seen 650mb usage in some youtube channel when I was watching manjaro review. Anyways a big THANK YOU ALL for taking time out for a noobie like me. I guess this is somewhat not even a problem.

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