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shantanu
Asked: 2016-06-12 08:55:46 +0800 CST

Lots of ram uses in Ubuntu 16.04

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After latest update of Ubuntu I found out that it's using lots of RAM. I have 8 GB of ram and from last week Ubuntu is using all of it.

I also use Android studio and after 2 hours, my system ram is full and lots of swap is in use. Everything goes sluggish. I tried to optimize memory uses of Android studio and Java but still it's not helping. Following images show the status of my system after 45 minutes of use. Now what exactly the way I can find the process which is responsible for this situation? I want report a bug but I need to find out the problematic process first.

System

Ubuntu 16.04(64 bit)
Ram: 8 GB
kernel: 4.4.0-24-generic

According to system monitor I can see all process are using around 3.8 GB of ram, where are the other process which are using other 3 GB of ram?

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java

3 Answers

  1. Try sudo top in a terminal. Then hit > or < until the Mem column is highlighted. The processes are then sorted by memory usage. Also, hit c to show the full command-line arguments of the processes.

    You won't see root's applications in gnome-system-monitor. Most-likely, the other 3Gigs are used by root either for lightdm or another process - background stuff that has to run on your system for it to function.

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  2. This is kind of widespread problem. A bug has been reported, but developers not yet responded.

    Follow the status of: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1572801

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  3. I recommend using smemstat over a long period of time to capture the change in memory, for example, running smemstat to capture memory changes every 60 seconds for 120 minutes, use:

    sudo smemstat 60 120 -o smemstat.json

    smemstat will capture changes in memory and dump the data into a json file.

    Hopefully that will provide some hint of what's eating memory over time.

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