I’ve been running into an issue recently where my system will start to stutter and freeze. Going into my task manager (Resources), I can see my using is using roughly 18/32GB of RAM despite closing all apps. Normally I should be at around 2GB on a fresh boot.
I’ve only noticed this issue appearing when first interacting with an app called Newsflash, but the issue persists even after closing the app. I even tried using systemd’s soft-reboot feature and even that did not clear the memory leak. So it seems the memory leak must be in the kernel itself.
And please don’t link linuxatemyram. This is not related to cached data.
- I don’t know what this tool is or how it gets its “memory” metric. If you want to continue to use it, please ascertain that these values correspond to RSS by cross checking with i.e. - ps aux. RSS is the memory exclusively held by a given process which is typically what mean by the “memory usage” of any given process. Note however that this does not count anonymous pages of a process that are swapped or shared with other processes.- Going into my task manager (Resources), I can see my using is using roughly 18/32GB of RAM despite closing all apps. - This does not tell you (or us for that matter) anything without defining what “using” means here. My system is “using” 77% of RAM right now but 45% of memory is available for use because it’s cached. - Please post the output of - free -haswell as- swapon.- Next, please post the contents of - /proc/meminfo.- Do you use ZFS? - deleted by creator - If you’re not going to post what I asked for, nobody can help you. 
 
 
- If you had something hog memory and a lot of other stuff got paged out of ram as a result, that can slow things down. Try running “top” and see how much swap space is in use. If it’s more than a little bit, once you have enough memory available by shutting off whatever was hogging it, try “swapoff” (pages the stuff back in, which can take a little while) followed by “swapon” to re-enable swap. 
- Are you by chance using an integrated GPU? - Noticed that my AMD Radeon 680M uses quite a lot of RAM as shared memory. - Using something like - amdgpu_topwill show how much RAM your iGPU is using, metric is ‘GTT’- deleted by creator 
 
- Check if there’s any large file in /tmp and /run/user/*? - Or just generally - df -h | grep tmpfsand look for any significant usage.- deleted by creator 
 
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- Probably this but seems like a pain to use: - https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/dev-tools/kmemleak.html 
- Do you use ZFS? It uses half your RAM for cache by default, which matches with 2GB used by user apps + 16GB = 18GB total. 
- does - echo 3 | sudo touch /proc/sys/vm/drop_cacheschange the available RAM at all when this happens?
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- Stop using Newsflash or submit a bug report? - deleted by creator - Got it, but it seems like Newsflash may have a memory leak issue? - deleted by creator 
 
 
 
- deleted by creator - That doesn’t make any sort of sense in this scenario. 
 




