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Over the course of a few days, I see the RAM Memory usage keeps going up and up. For example, I have 32 GB of RAM. System Monitor shows over 27 GB used, but when I look at Processes there is way less than 10 GB accounted for. Brave is about 3 GB. If I close Brave, System Monitor goes down about 100 MB, still showing about 27 GB being used. I let it go, eventually Ubuntu will crash.

rwg
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  • what makes you say that eventually ubuntu will crash? what sort of crash info did you get out of the machine previously, if there was a previous crash? what do the monitoring tools report as memory using processes? I'd suggest digging into tools like 'vmstat' and 'free'; top can be useful, but it often masks what's really going on. I suspect your system is, like most linux based systems, trying to use all available memory as IO caching, disk or network buffering... something. as nature abhors a vacuum, linux abhors unused memory. – frustrated. Mar 03 '23 at 23:20
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    Could you please provide us a screenshot of your system monitor resources usage and the output of free -h in a terminal? – jmath1983 Mar 04 '23 at 01:52
  • If you can identify the cause of the leak, then please file an appropriate bug report. AskUbuntu is not the bug tracker. – user535733 Mar 04 '23 at 02:13
  • "Crash" means the system resets. It appears the problem is buff/cache. It doesn't seem to go down by itself. I found some links that pointed me to: # sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches This clears the cache and all seems to be good. – rwg Mar 04 '23 at 22:55
  • I'm seeing the same issue on a 4GB SBC system, so I notice it immediately. The percentage of shared memory continues to raise while general memory percentage drops until applications begin to swap and at some point ground to halt. Only a reboot will free the shared memory! – WallyZ Mar 12 '23 at 04:24
  • $ free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31Gi 20Gi 470Mi 1.0Gi 10Gi 9.3Gi Swap: 0B 0B 0B – rwg Mar 13 '23 at 12:28
  • Believe I am seeing something similar. Thought it was a Firefox problem. But even when Firefox closed, swap memory still shows higher than expected usage on no user apps running. Ram has a couple of GB free at this time. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/1460651/why-is-firefox-eating-up-swap-on-ubuntu-22-04 – Joe Mar 31 '23 at 09:39
  • I have this issue with Ubuntu Studio 22.04.2. Closing applications does release RAM, except when I fall asleep to videos (played in SMPlayer, if that heps). When the video ends, the screen shuts off (but it's not set to suspend session). When I wake up, another GB of RAM is in use, even after quitting applications. The next day, more RAM is in use, and the next, etc., until the computer slows to a crawl and I have to reboot. I don't have this problem with Kubuntu 20.04 on the same computer. Device is triple-boot and uses legacy BIOS. As with OP, System Monitor doesn't account for the used RAM. – Royan Jun 28 '23 at 19:26

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