For a few weeks now I have been using Linux Mint 21.3 Xfce Edition. Yes it’s good, but one hell of a difference on boot ram usage. I always stop stuff I don’t use starting up on login, but in 21.3 the ram is still high. On both 21.2 and 21.3, always have a swap partition on, yet 21.3 still boots using really high percentage of ram, compared to 21.2. Both installed on same hardware, both using the same Kernel. I have gone back to 21.2 Victoria, simply because as I use the same apps as I did in 21.3, the ram usage is lower. What in Gods name is causing the ram usage to go through the roof in 21.3? Pictures below of 21.3 and 21.2, both at boot time. Neofetch with details of what hardware I am using.
I thought that as Xfce is one of the lightest environments in the whole of Linux, that maybe it was due to the fact of the system getting used to the ram, as in ram settling in. I had been using 21.3 for two months and today installed 21.2 and straight away the ram is low at boot. Did the Linux Mint team forget something? 21.3 has 21.2 at it’s base. I also always upgrade Xfce to 4.18.4, as default they are still using 4.18.2. Tried every trick in the book, bringing down the swappiness to 30 from 60, as it has no dangerous effects on a Desktop computer. Stopped unwanted apps from starting up at boot, added my own grub script to get rid of the annoying Mint Splash screen at boot, just leaving a nice blank screen, but realise that actually it’s only masking over the splash screen with blankness, as in black screen. Hopefully it will get addressed in time? I would hate to see their point release of 24.04 be doing the same.
What you showed does look strange and is a good question, I am running Mint Cinnamon 21.3 and it shows 941 MB used just after boot. From what I read, Cinnamon is suppose to take up more memory the Xfce, but your system at 21.3 is taking up more ram then mine. Maybe the difference is I am still at kernel 5.15.
Looking at the 2 screen shots, I noticed the number of packages are different. 2386 vs 2832 I wonder if that has a impact on the amount of memory that is being used.
Keep us posted if you or someone comes up with the answer to your question.
You mean ram usage immediately after boot, before you do anything?
That is about a 30% increase…far more than some minor software change.
I would be doing ps ax in both systems and sitting down to tediously compare what is running… there has to be some extra daemon , not likely to be the kernel.
You can even get ps or top to show memory usage of every process… it would be tedious, but the only way to find out is to look.
Mint is quite a large linux. Most distros boot with less than that.
I like to use htop to and sort the processes by memory usage. That should make it “easy” to see the differences between them. Unfortunately, you don’t have two identical systems to compare side by side. That makes it harder or at least more tedious.
No my other build with the same specs has Windows 11 on for gaming. In the future I plan to build another one with same specs. Just saving up for it. For the moment though I won’t be upgrading again to 21.3, till they sort the ram usage out. Unless of course I upgrade the Bios maybe? These builds are still using 2021 Bios. Where 21.3 at it’s base is using 21.2, maybe it has been tuned more for modern hardware?
That sounds like some program has a memory leak.
Can you identify it… must be one of the daemons… not likely to be kernel… may be a kernel module.
Too difficult for you to fix, may be a workaround.
May be specific to your computer type… it loads modules needed by the hardware.
Has anyone else reported it?
Sorry I cant magically solve it… your avoidance may be the best workaround.
Might try closing down the DE and see if issue still,exists.
Put 21.3 in a VM and study it.
I read a bit
It seems Linux is tuned to not free memory unless it has to. It just lets stuff lie there in memory , rather than use resources to free it. So memory usage will grow… until it needs more than it has available, and the it is forced to free some.
So id 21.3 is doing anything at all, its memory may grow, and that is supposedly
healthy.
How one is supposed to distinguish that from a real memory leak I dont know.?
