And I have seen it for an experienced user as well - Bizarre Pamac & Pacman behavior: used 62GiB memory, took 10min to refresh DBs - I thought is was a single instance - I stand corrected.
I suggest to disable pamac update nag - and use only the native Arch Linux pacman.
Pamac consist of several packages and several utilities depend on pamac.
If you do not use those utilities there is no reason to keep them.
- manjaro-application-utility - both a standalone and a plugin to manjaro-hello
- python-manjaro-sdk - provides integration between manjaro specific applications
- web-installer-url-handler - provides a mimetype to be handled by pamac
That is definitely a problem - wonder if an issue has been created at gitlab?
I just took a look at gitlab and there is a topic RAM usage of pamac-manager above 700-800 MB just to open it (#1381) · Issues · Applications / pamac · GitLab on the initial memory consumption.
The user’s system had 20 updates - occupying 7-800MB RAM - one can imagine what a stable update with 100’s of packages changed can do.
Taking some deep diving into this and data from my own system - it may be reasonable to look at the LordTermor / Pamac tray icon for plasma · GitLab tray.