On 2022-02-11 14:52, Celejar wrote:
As I mentioned in another post, I do this occasionally, but I'm not sure how to interpret the results. I just killed firefox; I got back about 3.5 GB, but the system is still using about 4.8, and Xorg's usage hasn't changed: ~ 4436M / 3081M / 105M.
Closing Firefox returns 100% of Firefox memory to OS (as long as all the processes are killed). I don't know that it would affect Xorg's usage though.
A lot of memory in Linux (and other OS's) is allocated to cache/buffers to speed things up. As programs use more memory the amount for that goes down.
For example on my system now with 16GB I have: MiB Mem : 16007.9 total, 4564.8 free, 6306.2 used, 5136.9 buff/cache (with thunderbird, chrome, etc. open). So 5GB is used for cache and 6GB is used for programs and about 4GB is free. Bijan
