System hangs and abnormal RAM usage by simple apps

[Mirdarthos]

I’ll just leave this here:

https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

https://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm

And remember:

Things change. That’s the way of a healthy life. Something that might have worked previously is not guaranteed to work today. Or tomorrow for that matter.

[nikgnomic]

Already stated that disabling Autostart applications would not resolve issues with applications in use after boot.

On my system RAM was upgraded from 4 GB to 8 GB a few years ago and 8 GB to 16 GB last year
I observed a small increase in the amount of RAM used after boot
But the RAM used by individual applications and number of processes did not increase
So I suspect upgrading RAM would not help to resolve issue

Additional processes may or may not relate to issue with applications

dmidecode would show more information about all processes

[cristian_c]

@soundofthunder

Swap is useful in more cases than the example you gave. If it were me, I’d start there… configure a swap partition (8 GB if you wish to hibernate, or 4GB if you don’t) or a swap file if you have sufficient space on / (root).

I’ve talked about swap in general, not discussing practical examples. BTW, if I need swap, usually I reserve an amount of space required to complete the needed task.

@soundofthunder

And then, I would re-evaluate the abnormal RAM usage. At the moment you have no configured swap at all, which probably will not enhance your situation. This abnormally high RAM simply has nowhere to go.

I don’t get the point. The abnormal RAM usage by some apps/processes (especially the simple ones) doesn’t depend on the existence of configured swap in the system.

@BG405

RAM usage is likely to be an issue if the OS has no space to put “less-needed” stuff to free up RAM needed for current processes. If there’s nowhere to offload stuff, what is it supposed to do with that data?

Sorry, could you explain what you mean, exactly (the part highlighted in bold)?

@BG405

The way Linux tends to work is it pre-allocates RAM; it doesn’t just leave available resources sitting there idle.

The abnormal behavior relates the amount of memory that Linux pre-allocates at least for some applications, which in my installation (suddenly) is more than double compared to any other installation, for no reason at all.

@Mirdarthos, based on what https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ says, I’m not complaining about free memory (which is not near to zero), I’m just complaining about used memory (*). BTW, free + buff/cache doesn’t match amount of available (and it doesn’t prevent hangs due to amount of used memory):

available memory (or “free + buffers/cache”) has enough room (let’s say, 20%+ of total)

The 2nd linked page (Linux is NOT Windows, which includes some mistakes too) mentions issues/topics other than the one I introduced at the beginning of the thread.

@Mirdarthos

And remember:

Things change. That’s the way of a healthy life. Something that might have worked previously is not guaranteed to work today. Or tomorrow for that matter.

The birth of the issue I showed is not connected to changes over time, also considering that this behavior suddenly started to affect only my installation, while the other current manjaro installations (which are also updated) are immune to that (as pointed out by data shown in this thread too).
(*)

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3,3Gi       3,0Gi       202Mi        19Mi       360Mi       328Mi

@nikgnomic, thanks for your reply. I’ve run sudo dmidecode in a live session and in the current installation for comparing them but I don’t understand where the output returns info about processes (I’ve also read dmidecode help and man, without success). Could you explain what you mean, exactly? Thanks in advance.

[soundofthunder]

Well, this is becoming a contextual swamp.
I’ll simply wish you luck.

Cheers.

[nikgnomic]

Data from dmidecode shows RAM used by hardware devices and should be similar on Live ISO and Installed OS if this is only a software/configuration issue

Previous suggestion was to boot a Live ISO and check RAM usage and number of processes
If abnormal RAM usage is not visible in Task Manager and number of processes are not as high as installed OS, issue is probably from a recent change or user misconfiguration

To check more information about RAM usage on installed OS I suggest using htop
howtogeek.com - how to use linux htop command
check values for process priority (PRI) and process niceness (NI)
and kill additional processes that are not running on other installed OS