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Hammett
Apprentice
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 240
Location: Barcelona, Catalonia
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 Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2024 3:31 pm Post subject: High RAM use on cold boot |
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Hi all,
I am seeing a high use of RAM on cold boot. Once I boot the system, I am seeing around 920MB of RAM usage.
I do not have anything fancy loading up, and my window manager is DWM, which should be fairly light. I would expect the RAM use to be around 250-300MB, but not triple that.
This is the services I have running:
| Code: | Runlevel: boot
hwclock [ started ]
modules [ started ]
fsck [ started ]
root [ started ]
mtab [ started ]
swap [ started ]
localmount [ started ]
systemd-tmpfiles-setup [ started ]
seedrng [ started ]
hostname [ started ]
sysctl [ started ]
bootmisc [ started ]
acpid [ started ]
zram-init [ started ]
termencoding [ started ]
keymaps [ started ]
save-keymaps [ started ]
procfs [ started ]
binfmt [ started ]
iptables [ started ]
save-termencoding [ started ]
elogind [ started ]
alsasound [ started ]
net.lo [ started ]
loopback [ started ] |
| Code: | Runlevel: default
syslog-ng [ started ]
dbus [ started ]
net.eno1 [ started ]
mpd [ started ]
lm_sensors [ started ]
dcron [ started ]
fancontrol [ started ]
local [ started ]
Dynamic Runlevel: hotplugged
Dynamic Runlevel: needed/wanted
display-manager-setup [ started ]
Dynamic Runlevel: manual |
Aside from that I have the following programs upon boot:
- pipewire
- wireplumber
- mpd
- picom
- easyeffects
And this is the output from "free -h" | Code: | total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 15Gi 1.4Gi 13Gi 45Mi 884Mi 14Gi
Swap: 20Gi 0B 20Gi |
*Note the use of RAM and buff/cache is higher due to the browser, but "used" on cold boot is around 920MB and "buff/cache" is around 420MB, which I think is pretty high also for the system just being started
What else could be wrong? Should I share my kernel config as well?
Thank you
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user
Apprentice
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
Posts: 212
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| Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2024 9:24 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Hammett,
second of all main memory rules: using existing main memory is better then prevent to use free main memory in any case.
As you find it out already, your main memory is currently mostly used for buffer/cache. That is fine, it can reduce latency on slower IO paths.
Don't worry, used buffer/cache memory will be freed/reduced if an application demand more main memory as currently unused.
To find most memory consuming processes, try this shell command and dive into memory design topic of "rss" vs "size" vs "vsz".
| Code: | | # ps -eo pmem,rss,size,vsz,pid,ucmd --sort=-rss | head -10 |
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Hammett
Apprentice
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 240
Location: Barcelona, Catalonia
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| Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2024 6:38 am Post subject: |
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| user wrote: | Hi Hammett,
second of all main memory rules: using existing main memory is better then prevent to use free main memory in any case.
As you find it out already, your main memory is currently mostly used for buffer/cache. That is fine, it can reduce latency on slower IO paths.
Don't worry, used buffer/cache memory will be freed/reduced if an application demand more main memory as currently unused.
To find most memory consuming processes, try this shell command and dive into memory design topic of "rss" vs "size" vs "vsz".
| Code: | | # ps -eo pmem,rss,size,vsz,pid,ucmd --sort=-rss | head -10 |
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Hi user,
Thanks for the reply. I am very happy for Linux to use as much memory for buffers/caches as it needs, and I agree RAM is there to be used, but I think you are missing the point.
In cold boot, I should not be using that much RAM and I am trying to figure out why this is happening and what processes are using it.
Thank you for the one-liner, I will have a look!
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user
Apprentice
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
Posts: 212
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| Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2024 1:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Hammett wrote: |
In cold boot, I should not be using that much RAM and I am trying to figure out why this is happening and what processes are using it.
Thank you for the one-liner, I will have a look! |
What is your assumption that buffer/cache is unexpected high after initial cold boot? Maybe program X reads MiB of content during initial start?
Drop file cache and check remained buffer/cache:
| Code: | | free && sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && free |
Configured zram-init is a good candidate to still consume buffer/cache. |
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Hammett
Apprentice
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 240
Location: Barcelona, Catalonia
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| Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2024 2:45 pm Post subject: |
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| user wrote: | | Hammett wrote: |
In cold boot, I should not be using that much RAM and I am trying to figure out why this is happening and what processes are using it.
Thank you for the one-liner, I will have a look! |
What is your assumption that buffer/cache is unexpected high after initial cold boot? Maybe program X reads MiB of content during initial start?
Drop file cache and check remained buffer/cache:
| Code: | | free && sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && free |
Configured zram-init is a good candidate to still consume buffer/cache. |
That is why I posted the init scripts + what I load upon boot. I do not see anything that requires that much data to be read. Not mpd, not easyeffects, not mpd, not the nvidia module, not pipewire or wireplumber... Is there a way to check what reads that amount of data?
I am also looking at the zram-init, but that is only for /var/tmp/portage, which is empty upon boot (I checked). I even removed nfs client thinking it might cache some files of the network drive....
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eccerr0r
Watchman
Joined: 01 Jul 2004
Posts: 9847
Location: almost Mile High in the USA
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| Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2024 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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Also keep in mind the more RAM you have, the more RAM the computer will waste (page tables is a biggie but there's more than just this), so if you're concerned about memory usage, remove hardware RAM and your consumption will go down.
Yes this was tongue-in-cheek, so again don't worry about consumption until you run out... Those with less RAM have to worry about it more (though they have the benefit of having less page table consumption...).
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Hammett
Apprentice
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 240
Location: Barcelona, Catalonia
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| Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2024 12:06 pm Post subject: |
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| user wrote: | | Hammett wrote: |
In cold boot, I should not be using that much RAM and I am trying to figure out why this is happening and what processes are using it.
Thank you for the one-liner, I will have a look! |
What is your assumption that buffer/cache is unexpected high after initial cold boot? Maybe program X reads MiB of content during initial start?
Drop file cache and check remained buffer/cache:
| Code: | | free && sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && free |
Configured zram-init is a good candidate to still consume buffer/cache. |
Finally found out that zram-init was the culprit. Even though I had it set it up only for /var/tmp/portage, it was consuming RAM. Once uninstalled, the cold boot RAM is at 420MB of RAM
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