My computer over the last week has (after using the computer for a few hours) shown very high ram usage, around 50 - 60% out of 32GB, even though nothing in htop appears to be the culprit with the highest consumer being Firefox at 1.6% ram, even in a tty, around half of my ram is being used up even though no process shows over 0.1% ram. Rebooting does seem to work, but I’d prefer not to every few hours. Do you think it might be an issue with hardware? I did build my pc so perhaps something’s broken?
It’s probably buffer/cache.
I hate that this is the default answer to these questions, most tools by which less tech savy have detrmined that something is using a lot of ram are accounting for buffers and don’t subtract it from the free space. Every time when I clicked on someones post (well on Reddit, here its the first one) regarding their ram usage being high and this website was posted, it was not the buffer/cache. So while it is obviosly important to get to know how OP determined that something was using a lot of ram, directly assuming that they read it wrong is imo simply not helpful and in most cases just more confusing
Does that include the buffer/cache memory usage?
How would I find this out?
Run
free -mand look at the output. That will tell you how much memory is used by programs, how much is being used as cache, and how much is available. The memory used as cache will be freed if a program needs it.total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 32032 20961 2048 464 9022 10152 Swap: 2048 138 1909Here’s the output
Are you using zfs?