What is using my RAM?

Question

My laptop has started swapping like a cat: When I do nothing, it does nothing, but as soon as I do something it starts swapping.

$ free
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        32691536    27932080      725360     2694016     4034096     1311600
Swap:      165950456    80476784    85473672

Based on this I would expect 27-4 GB = 23 GB is used for resident programs. But according to ps only 7.5 GB are used by RSS:

$ ps aux | perl -ane '$s+=$F[5];END{print "$s\n"}'
7596328

What am I missing?

If Linux, ps aux --sort -rss | head will show the processes using the most memory. — Nasir Riley, Feb 26 '23 at 20:42

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 26 '23 at 19:39

0

zfs.

zfs uses ~8GB kernel RAM.

Not loading zfs gave back most of the missing mem back.

answered Feb 26 '23 at 19:39

Ole Tange

35,514

Errr ? AFAIK ZFS is supposed to use 50 % of the host memory for the ARC. But it's just a default value you can tune in zfs.conf. Now my turn to ask : What am I missing ? – MC68020 Feb 26 '23 at 20:23

What is using my RAM?

1 Answers1