People have already written on this issue with plasmashell, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a definite solution (see below). I have 32 GB of RAM, and half of it is used up by plasmashell. Even some swap is taken.
I estimated the amount of RAM used up by the plasmashell by counting the many plasmashell processes in htop.
A script to fix this or something like this has been mentioned in December:
Is that still applicable?
I think somebody said that such behavior is by design. Is that the case?
I’m a big fan of KDE Plasma, by the way. It is so rich and intuitive. I barely even changed the ways it is OOTB. I came from Mint’s Cinnamon and was blown away. It wouldn’t be my first choice to give up on Plasma. (And reinstalling at this point would be a hassle, too.)
Probably have to reboot, but, as I have already complained here, Timeshift is wasting my time without mercy, so I’m waiting until it finishes deleting the snapshot.
Where do you see that? If that was the case as a bug, we all should be affected … The second linked topic shows 0 17440 G /usr/bin/plasmashell 115MiB
That is not half of 32GiB Or was something else you pointed that out?
System Monitor shows this on my end regarding plasmashell
This is an example of what I saw in htop. I realize I’m probably wrong, but I took it to mean that 32,4% of available RAM (approx. 10 gigs) is taken by plasmashell.
ram: 32Go used: 3Go (brave use most)
available: 14 Go
shared: 13Go : default is 50% ram, can be released if needed (so you can view also as available )
free: 800Mo … is good, because linux optimize all ram : use all if no needed by apps
If shared can be released as needed, why was swap used? Truth be told, I didn’t reduce swappiness yet. But does this mean that shared is inaccessible until the entire swap (33 gigs) is taken?
why you have swap ? we set swap only for hibernation or pc have few ram (less 8Go)
as writed in man, “shared” is a virtual directory (read man tmpfs) : if at a moment you use 15Go, linux reduce tmpfs
shared: 13Go : view as 13Go max (not /tmp/ use 13Go)
According to this site, and as you said, the system returns memory to apps if they need it. But the site says swap won’t be used. And my swap was used, though too much. I don’t get it.
The site also lists the increase in swap used as a warning sign.
EDIT 2 Looked at tmpfs(5) — Arch manual pages
It says tmpfs can use swap, so I guess the other site isn’t trustworthy.
But it isn’t explicitly stated that the space is freed if the apps need it. Isn’t the space as good as taken then?
Oh, my apologies, I meant to type “though not too much”.
I upgraded from 16 gigs because I sometimes work with huge files. I never thought I’d have to reboot Linux to use the entire new RAM. I still assume that apps can’t reclaim shared, because I didn’t find an absolute confirmation of that.
