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rodude123
Asked: 2020-06-01 11:07:51 +0800 CST

20.04 ram issues

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recently after updating to ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu suddenly uses a lot of ram more ram than it used to. In daily usage, it has gone from using like 5GB of ram to like 11GB I don't even run that much. All I basically run is Firefox with about 8 tabs in general and a bunch of addons. I also run some JetBrains IDE whether that is pycharm, phpstorm or even rider. It still manages to eat up ram to about 11GB. Does anyone know any tools I can use to see how I can decrease the ram usage? Even something that will try and decrease ram usage for me.

Edit 1: Here is the output of free -h

free-h

Edit 2: Here are the other 2 outputs sysctl vm.swappiness

top

Edit 3: here is snap list and ls -al

snap list

Edit 4: here is gnome extensions ls -al local gnome extensions global gnome extensions

firefox ide ram 20.04

2 Answers

  1. Check and ajust content process limit in Firefox preferences.

    enter image description here

    In my case I unchecked "Use recommended performance settings" and reduced the limit from 8 (which was default and is still "recommended") to 1. Firefox stopped eating RAM. But twitch and youtube streaming in multiple tabs had noticeably degraded and almost became unusable. Later I increased the number to 4 and I didn't notice increase in RAM usage but browser was able to properly render heavy content again.
    After the entire day in Pycharm and Firefox my RAM is only 46% full instead of 90+% that I experienced during previous couple of months.

    For reference, specs of my laptop are intel i5-8265U (4 core, 8 threads) and 16 GB of RAM.

    My case was really similar because I also use Pycharm (maximum heap size set to 4gb), latest Firefox with 8-10 addons and 10-100 tabs (when I closed all but 5-6 tabs, Firefox didn't free RAM) and a couple of more lightweight apps on my Ubuntu 20.04. So I hope my answer qualifies as proper answer.

    The downside is I was not able to use any tools to inspect and resolve the problem. Almost pure random.
    Buttons in about:memory didn't reduce the RAM usage from ~10GB level even if I left only one tab with some lightweight html page (Hacker News, for example).
    about:performance was useless as well, it didn't show high RAM usage.

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  2. about:config

    search for

    LowMemory

    set it to true. Restart firefox.

    • 0