I've installed Antergos and I've been using it for the past few days. It has no swap, as I deemed 8 gigs of RAM enough to run swapless.
Yesterday after some medium-intensity browsing I hit alt+f2 to do something, and kupfer (which I set up in place of Cinnamon's standard alt+f2) didn't come up. I checked the taskbar and there was a warning about having run out of memory. I checked conky, and sure enough
all of my RAM had been used up.
Now, I'm a fairly heavy tab user, so I can certainly put a load on a system's RAM, but I've done much worse than how it was when this happened in both Windows and LMDE (the distro I used before Antergos) and I never ran out of physical memory.
I closed all instances of Chrome and memory use subsided slightly, but it only freed a gig or two. Firing up the browser again ate it all back up in no time.
I thought it might have been the special Flash player Chrome uses, so I rebooted and ran Firefox for another browsing session. No difference - RAM gets eaten up in no time, and not freed up properly when I quit or kill the browser.
I also don't understand the discrepancy in monitoring tools. Have a look at this screenshot, which I took after I'd quit everything I could quit:
http://i.imgur.com/5o5Kbd3.png
Conky says that 91% of the RAM is taken, but neither ps nor top can see what is actually taking it up. As a result I don't know how to free it up, other than a reboot.
I might think Conky's reporting it wrong, if it weren't that when it says 100% stuff really does refuse to start up.
Edit: something odd is going on. Right after posting this I checked Conky and it says 71% of the RAM is taken, but top shows Firefox as only taking 8.1%, cinnamon 4.5% , xorg 2.2% and a smattering of other processes that take a couple more percent points. I'd certainly expect top to be right under normal circumstances, but again, when conky says 100% stuff no longer starts.
