To help diagnose your issue you can install htop and iotop to get a better idea of what's going on when you have problems. Also, system monitor reports my total RAM at 4.7 when the actual number is closer to 4.9GB. This number is often much higher as the cache will sometimes grow to more than 50% of the total. System-monitor says I'm using 1.4GB of RAM and the actual RAM in use including buffers/cache is 2.7GB, almost twice the reported figure. Alot of the RAM in use is used for caching and is not usually necessary to run the immediateĪs for the system showing 3GB of RAM in use, run the following command and you should get a more accurate number: free So, if you had 12GB of RAM you might see 8 or even 9GB of RAM use instead. The reason you don't see as much RAM in use as before is because Linux is designed to most efficiently make use of and take advantage of the available system resources.

When the system is in heavy use, those cached files get transfered to swap. People are usually alarmed when they see high RAM usage on a linux desktop but the developers insist that the system will actually run faster because what is in the ram is cached data that can easily and quickly be retrieved by the system. This will clear your cash even though most of the time it's not necessary especially if swappiness is enabled. (warning: If you have installed profile-sync-daemon, close firefox and run the command sudo service psd stop before you run the following command!) echo '3' | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches If you really want to do something about it, you can run the following command to clear your cash: Ram will get full but it's not always a problem.

If you increase swappiness, the data in RAM will get paged out to the swap partition when your ram reaches a certain level. If you disable swappiness, your RAM will get more full.

Linux monitor ram usage