@killyourfm free memory is wasted memory. please, read up on how #linux manages memory? hint: if you had 128 gb, you'd also had it almost completely used if your uptime is in days, — that's normal and expected.
@tivasyk I understand the concept, but I reject the result.
You need SOME free memory so your system doesn't grind to a halt. In this case, it was the KDE indexer using nearly 20GB of RAM, which is completely unexpected and unnaceptable, you know?
@killyourfm and what is the result? is your system freezing? is your swap filled up? if not, then the memory manager does it's job just fine.
baloo indexer is known to use a lot or memory, but try running another memory hungry app besides it and it will give up a lot of it back at the memory manager's request, try it.
good news is you can disable baloo ;-) bad news? you won't like that memory taken up by chrome, it's less willing to free it up ;-)
@killyourfm I am just a simple Linux user. I have been told by a Linux "expert" that on Linux memory management is complicated and different than windows. It mostly uses memory like " just in case I need all this memory ". Something like that.
I too often see full memory usage even though I hardly use any heavy program. Besides that everything runs smoothly so it should all be ok.
Sometimes my ram reading even differs depending on the method I use. Too difficult for me.
@killyourfm@kde Yes the baloo is a service in KDE and its known to be not working correctly. A few years back when I researched, no one was working on this program. It's the file indexer for the KDE search functionalities. When I was using KDE, I ended up disabling and removing baloo. Not only takes it so much memory, it also used one of my 8 threads of 4 real cores to be almost always 100% working.
Just websearch for something like "baloo ram memoryleak too much" and such. It's common problem
@killyourfm@kde favourite quirk - Baloo can grind a system to a halt if you forget to mark a directory to be ignored from indexing (especially if that dir is filled with lots of small files)
@killyourfm@kde
I've had this too for the first few days my PC was sluggish and almost unusable, and it would crash on a certain folder of photos every time without fail
@killyourfm@kde I use a ton of extensions and it's great for the most part, but then something breaks and it's annoying. If it weren't for extensions, I wouldn't be able to use stock GNOME, it's just too simple
@killyourfm so, you've disabled the kde indexer and (hopefully?) continue to run the system without reboot. how much free memory does the same tool report now? care to share another screenshot? ;-)
@killyourfm@kde I remember having a similar problem a long time ago. I ended up fixing it by removing some directories from Krunner indexing. Apparently it struggles with large directories
@killyourfm@kde the first thing I do for years on new plasma installs is to run
$ balooctl disable
That memory leak has been around for a minimum of 6 years. Granted "tracker" on GNOME can be rough sometimes but it recovers and doesn't hit the same absurd levels as baloo.
@killyourfm Wow, whenever I get close to that usage (my system only has 24GiB of RAM), it's because I wrote a memory leak (or allocated too much memory).
@killyourfm that doesn't sound right, afaik that shouldn't use that much RAM...
Have you tried things like Franz and Ferdium, they are embedded chromium Browsers for things like slack, WhatsApp and discord; electron Apps with a web equivalent, gets you most of 5h3 way to a desktop app without needing multiple instances of electron, and as a bonus, they don't share cookies/information afaik.
@teivel We solved it deeper in the thread. Apparently it's KDE's indexing service, which can be safely disabled or even removed. But wow, what a RAM hog...
@killyourfm I saw it after typing that comment, glad you solved it!
My experience with krunner was; I saw a friend using Spotlight on their Mac, thought: I'm sure Linux has something similar, found krunner, it started indexing the whole system, stopped krunner, never used it again.
After that I switched to i3 and got used to dmenu then rofi, and realized I just wanted something to search for apps, so I never needed file indexing at all...
@killyourfmlaughs in 8GB RAM 😂
That said much as a technologist as I am, my actual hardware needs are fairly light right now. Lighter now I’m off Windows, heh
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