Bazzite high idle RAM usage, can someone explain?
Hi, I was joking a lot and said: "Unused RAM is wasted RAM"
But now I'm actually curious, why is the idle RAM usage of bazzite so "high" I mean in comparison to other Distros it's 2x or 3x as high.
My Bazzite GNOME Desktop Edition, boots with 4.2GB RAM usage. And as you can see, the PC is just 30sec on. For comparison: Recently I was on Debian, I kind of copied the GNOME Bazzite layout with all the Extensions and the RAM usage right after boot is ~1,4GB, the only App that I've selected for Autostart is
Solaar, I also had it on Debian. On Fedora or openSUSE it was like ~1,8GB and I always used systemd zram, if that matters.
And I never see vram being used, at first I thought that there is just stuff in zram swap, but everytime I check, it's just a couple mib or nothing.
I also heard about an application or service, that is called "Preload" idk, if it's even installed on Bazzite, but if yes, is it because some RAM is cached, to preload you most used apps?28 Replies
hmmm to see what is using RAM have a look at
btop and you can order the processes from most to least ram usage
ahhh nevermind. it's using 2.8Gib in buff/cache, so it's using your free ram but it will release it if neededLinux always caches every file you open and keeps it cached as long as you have ram
That being said, I want to say that that ram measurement does not include cache...
I don't use fastfetch though
Okay thanks, but I've used multipe distros and none was over 2 or 2,2GB at boot
.
Very weird
Even after rebooting?
No but still I'm not sure that's counted
Also bazzite uses OSTree and that does some stuff
Unsure how it affects ram after boot
but I also used silverblue before
It was the same?
it wasnt that high
I had the lowest on GNOME Debian
I mean.. I have 32GB ... I doesn't hurt.
But since I got the Vitals Extension, it sometimes bugs me when I see high RAM usage
:D
this was on debian with the exact same setup
I'm curious myself why the idle RAM usage is much higher than traditional distros. It's definitely not a problem of any kind at least - unused RAM is wasted RAM after all - but it is a curiosity
Do you have similar results? Roghly ~4GB? displayed?
Yep, consistently on every boot
As you can see - fresh boot
Thank you ✌️
Cool specs btw
Thanks - we have fairly similar systems haha
Steam, Discord & Firefox with 2 Tabs
Looks scary.. but probably because everything is cached like antheas said
I don't think the cache is included in used
sorry yea right.. you already said this
but if not... how is that so high? oO
It is included in free though
Meaning free + cached = available
I usually hover around 10gb with 20 tabs open and 2 vs code windows on arch so dunno
No steam
20 Tabs 💀
Maybe zram is included
Mhm.. idk at this point, zram included would be "impossible"
Because my system boots with ~4GB RAM and the zram is also 4GB RAM.
And 4GB RAM used minus the 4GB zram would be zero.
Zram is compressed, 4gb is the size it'll contain
Run zramctl at boot, it'll show you what it's really doing
my system runs using 5gb ram on average out of 14.5gb (steam deck LCD) (idle/nothing open). i switched to nobara for a while because of this, but i switched back cause of nobara having bugs.
sounds normal
is there a way to lower it without switching distros?
no
it's working as intended
alright