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Richard W. Seitz
Asked: 2019-05-12 04:05:31 +0800 CST

slow running computer

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The computer slows down and the system monitor shows anywhere from 91% to 98% memory utilization and runs painfully slow. After a fresh reboot system monitor shows around 17% memory utilization. Gnome-shell increases in size from 133 Mb to upwards of 400 Mb. This happens even if the computer sits idle for any period of time.

with nothing running except firefox the memory has slowly crept up see below;

rick@rick-M52BC-M32BC:~$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7890        2369         625          44        4895        5179
Swap:         28804          35       28769

rick@rick-M52BC-M32BC:~$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7890        2493         466          71        4930        5028
Swap:         28804          35       28769

Here is where the memory is at 85% full. Same idle status

rick@rick-M52BC-M32BC:~$ free -m  
            total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available  
Mem:           7890        6470         206          54        1212          1070
Swap:         28804          69       28735

Here is the header from top:

top - 00:41:24 up 13:42,  1 user,  load average: 0.37, 0.59, 0.38
Tasks: 293 total,   1 running, 292 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.4 us,  0.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.1 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   7890.1 total,    255.4 free,   6382.5 used,   1252.3 buff/cache
MiB Swap:  28805.0 total,  28735.5 free,     69.5 used.   1158.4 avail Mem

This will continue to creep up until all memory is used.

memory-usage ram 19.04

1 Answers

  1. Knowing the Linux will use memory to cache data was not the problem. I have finally found out the problem for the slow running computer. It was caused by the plex media server.

    rick@rick-M52BC-M32BC:~$ service plexmediaserver stop

    rick@rick-M52BC-M32BC:~$ service plexmediaserver start

    dropped the memory usage down from 87% to 29% usage immediately.

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