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03-04-2021, 06:13 PM
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#1
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LQ Newbie
Registered: Dec 2020
Posts: 28
Rep: 
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System Is Not Using All Available RAM.
Hello! I hope I am posting this in the correct section. I have built my own distro, based (initially) on LFS, but I have since spent countless hours expanding its usefulness. That being said, I can generate reports/logs, as long as somebody can tell me what programs/packages to use (I am still kind of new to Linux).
Today's issue comes from my system being incredibly slow, despite having (IMO) pretty good hardware. At the very least, I would expect that 32GB of DDR4 RAM (I can't remember what the frequency is), and a 10th gen i5 processor could keep up with literally just an empty AbiWord window, a Konsole window, and XFCE (with nothing running). I checked system stats, and I noticed that none of my 12 cores came under even 3% usage, and my disk usage stayed below 10% (I was using wget to download a directory), yet memory usage was consistently at 99%.
I would think my system is at fault, given that I built it, but I have no issue running games, browsers, tons of tabs, stuff in the backround, etc., so this whole issue must be from something in the operating system. I saw wget was using ~95% of memory, so I killed it, but given the aforementioned 32GB of DDR4, I really shouldn't have to, especially when it seems to work when in the shell.
That being said, how can I check if my system is using all available memory? I boot into my OS, so I don't need to save any for a host system or anything. Thanks for the help!
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03-04-2021, 06:23 PM
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#2
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LQ Sage
Registered: Nov 2004
Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
Distribution: Gentoo ~amd64
Posts: 7,675
Rep: 
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Having excess RAM will not give you any boost, most Linux systems work fine under 2-4 GB of RAM and adding more RAM won't improve a thing. Your bottleneck lies elsewhere.
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03-04-2021, 06:46 PM
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#3
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LQ Newbie
Registered: Dec 2020
Posts: 28
Original Poster
Rep: 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Emerson
Having excess RAM will not give you any boost, most Linux systems work fine under 2-4 GB of RAM and adding more RAM won't improve a thing. Your bottleneck lies elsewhere.
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I get that excess RAM won't fix anything. The issue is that my system is not using my RAM, despite it being available.
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03-04-2021, 06:54 PM
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#4
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LQ Sage
Registered: Nov 2004
Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
Distribution: Gentoo ~amd64
Posts: 7,675
Rep: 
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RAM and its usage, kernel sees all that RAM and tries to make sure it is not a complete waste, uses it for file cache.
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03-04-2021, 08:48 PM
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#5
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LQ Newbie
Registered: Dec 2020
Posts: 28
Original Poster
Rep: 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Emerson
RAM and its usage, kernel sees all that RAM and tries to make sure it is not a complete waste, uses it for file cache.
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While I appreciate the link (I really do, I didn't know that), my issue is not being addressed. Regardless of what Linux is trying to do, my computer is freezing and is virtually unusable. To put it bluntly, I don't really care what it should be doing, all I know is that the system is unable to open any programs, windows freeze, processes stall, and the entire thing is screwed.
How do I stop my system from freezing?
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03-05-2021, 11:29 AM
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#6
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LQ Guru
Registered: Oct 2004
Distribution: Arch
Posts: 5,361
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That is tons of RAM for linux box.
Quote:
(I was using wget to download a directory), yet memory usage was consistently at 99%.
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Show the wget command string that you are using.
Quote:
I saw wget was using ~95% of memory, so I killed it,
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Show what you are doing with wget. That is weird. Are you downloading to file? Or are you trying to download something, and not writing to file until it is done? How big is the something?
Quote:
That being said, how can I check if my system is using all available memory?
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Look at:
Code:
free
cat /proc/meminfo
Quote:
How do I stop my system from freezing?
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If you are filling up 32GB of RAM, then you need to find what process is doing that.
Also, how do you have swappiness set? Are you sure that you are filling up your RAM? Could some of the slowdown be because you are swapping, and trying to read from swap.
What are you using to measure RAM usage? How do you know that your RAM is fully in use? Are you swapping? Need a lot more info to diagnose this.
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