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I'm having a RAM problem where my RAM is full but there's nothing consuming al of it. The sudo htop commands shows my real memory usage, while sudo gnome-system-monitor shows the memory full. It wouldn't be a problem but the system actually thinks it's full so it closes Firefox tabs, and I can't open other VMs.

It's worth noting that I use VMs but they are stopped. Maybe when I stop there's a bug in KVM which does not free the VM memory. Right now I have a VM with 15GB RAM + Firefox on the host machine with lots of tabs. It should be taking 19GB as said by htop.

I'm using Ubuntu 22.04. This wasn't happening in 21.10 and 21.04

enter image description here

Firefox keeps closing my tabs thinking the PC is using all the RAM, but it isn't. I can't work!

Rafaelo
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1 Answers1

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You are not comparing the same things. Your graphical display is showing cached memory, which always tends to eventually appear full with linux, and your numeric display is showing what memory is actually available if recoverable caches were dropped which they will be if the memory is needed. Example, notice how the cache size changes after I ask the system to delete them:

root@s15:/home/doug# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           15724         407         152           5       15163       14983
Swap:          16085         132       15953
root@s15:/home/doug# sync
root@s15:/home/doug# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
root@s15:/home/doug# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           15724         407       15139           5         176       15062
Swap:          16085         132       15953
Doug Smythies
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