New arch install uses a lot of ram

[MiszS]

So i just installed arch linux from the latest ISO on my second laptop, and it for some reason uses 2.5GB of ram without anything open, when before it was around 800MB, the system monitor shows the same ram usage as btop and neofetch, but it doesn't show what uses it.

[Nayr438]

Considering your using KDE Plasma its probably the background services for search, indexing, and caching. Any complete Desktop Environment should produce a similar result with your 8G of memory. If this is a concern you could look at a more slimmed down Desktop like LXQT or XFCE, but some background caching will still likely occur.

[Eigenvektor]

49 minutes ago, MiszS said:

but it doesn't show what uses it.

Except for Calendar Reminders using 860 MiB, System Monitor using 126 MiB, etc.? If you add up the numbers from all applications in that list, does it get close to 2.8 GiB?

 

What's the output of "free -h"?

[Alex Atkin UK]

51 minutes ago, MiszS said:

So i just installed arch linux from the latest ISO on my second laptop, and it for some reason uses 2.5GB of ram without anything open, when before it was around 800MB, the system monitor shows the same ram usage as btop and neofetch, but it doesn't show what uses it.

That likely includes buffers/cache, look at "free -h" in konsole.  You can also look in Processes to see what is actually using RAM.  I usually just bring up System Activity with Ctrl+Esc to see what is going on.

 

The kwin manager can eat RAM over time, but it shouldn't be too bad on a fresh boot.

[MiszS]

51 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

That likely includes buffers/cache, look at "free -h" in konsole.  You can also look in Processes to see what is actually using RAM.  I usually just bring up System Activity with Ctrl+Esc to see what is going on.

 

The kwin manager can eat RAM over time, but it shouldn't be too bad on a fresh boot.

 

52 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Except for Calendar Reminders using 860 MiB, System Monitor using 126 MiB, etc.? If you add up the numbers from all applications in that list, does it get close to 2.8 GiB?

 

What's the output of "free -h"?

 

This is the output right after a fresh restart, and it does NOT add up to 2.5GB of memory, even with 800MB cache (how do i remove it?), it does not make sense to be using 1700MB of memory, linux mint on my main pc uses around 1200MB with nothing in background

 

[C2dan88]

You are using your igpu so some of your system ram will be allocated to that?

[Eigenvektor]

12 minutes ago, MiszS said:

even with 800MB cache (how do i remove it?)

You don't. It's there to speed things up, disabling it would be detrimental to performance. It will automatically be made available, should running programs need it.

 

It's the difference between "free" (the amount of RAM currently unused) and "available" (that amount of RAM that is available for programs to use)

 

You can try

ps -eo size,command --sort -size

to see all processes listed by size and

ps -eo size,command --sort -size | awk '{ hr=$1/1024/1024 ; sum +=hr} END {print sum}'

to get the sum total of the memory used by these processes. See if that adds up to 2.7 GiB

[MiszS]

48 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

You don't. It's there to speed things up, disabling it would be detrimental to performance. It will automatically be made available, should running programs need it.

 

It's the difference between "free" (the amount of RAM currently unused) and "available" (that amount of RAM that is available for programs to use)

 

You can try

ps -eo size,command --sort -size

to see all processes listed by size and

ps -eo size,command --sort -size | awk '{ hr=$1/1024/1024 ; sum +=hr} END {print sum}'

to get the sum total of the memory used by these processes. See if that adds up to 2.7 GiB

it says "unknown format specifier" when i try to run those commands

[MiszS]

I just tried reinstalling it, and there's some weird error every time, its either instantly an error, or after a few minutes of it installing stuff, wtf is wrong with the arch installer?

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, MiszS said:

I just tried reinstalling it, and there's some weird error every time, its either instantly an error, or after a few minutes of it installing stuff, wtf is wrong with the arch installer?

I've seen a lot of negativity about Arch all around being easily broken, its probably the last distro I'd use personally.  The Asahi Linux developers ditched Arch due to the problems and moved to Fedora.

[MiszS]

2 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I've seen a lot of negativity about Arch all around being easily broken, its probably the last distro I'd use personally.  The Asahi Linux developers ditched Arch due to the problems and moved to Fedora.

I tried to install it 1 last time, and it somehow actually worked, this time i went with i3, but now it's stuck at the login screen, after i logged in, it asked me if i want to generate config or the default one, i selected to generate, and after first question it just didn't give me the next menu, with me being stuck in the login screen, only the i3 bar appeared on the bottom, do you know what to do? i've tried going to the terminal, but none of the shortcuts seem to work

[kenkku]

On 1/22/2024 at 12:08 AM, MiszS said:

I tried to install it 1 last time, and it somehow actually worked, this time i went with i3, but now it's stuck at the login screen, after i logged in, it asked me if i want to generate config or the default one, i selected to generate, and after first question it just didn't give me the next menu, with me being stuck in the login screen, only the i3 bar appeared on the bottom, do you know what to do? i've tried going to the terminal, but none of the shortcuts seem to work

It kinda looks like you logged in, but your screen didn't refresh. The bar at the bottom shouldn't be drawing over the greeter. Try using any of i3's key combos (assuming your mod key is set) to open something and see if that works. Also, are you using archinstall, or are you installing it manually?

[MiszS]

5 hours ago, kenkku said:

It kinda looks like you logged in, but your screen didn't refresh. The bar at the bottom shouldn't be drawing over the greeter. Try using any of i3's key combos (assuming your mod key is set) to open something and see if that works. Also, are you using archinstall, or are you installing it manually?

it may actually not been broken, i just had no idea that alt + enter would be the terminal shortcut, because it makes no sense, after reinstalling it, the i3 worked fine, but i installed xfce after that, because don't rlly wanna configure everything