**NOTE: i have only used linux for about a year or so and im not a power user, im basically a tired windows user but i know more stuff than most beginners i feel like? like not a lot more but a little bit ** so when i don’t have anything open my memory usage is like 4-5GB out of 16, which makes it pretty bad when i want to play games (even minecraft can make it so my pc use 99% memory so i have to hard reset, although i might have fixed that) and/or when i want some demanding theming things (like a live wallpaper). “Background services” is using like 4GB and “baloo_file_extractor” is using like 1GB out of the 4. I have done a tiny tiny bit of research and ive found out that baloo is a file indexing thingo, but idrk what file indexing is used for so i don’t know if i should disable it

distro: endeavourOS de: kde plasma wayland ram: 16gb of something (i have a prebuilt so idk what ddr it is or whatever)

if you need more info then please say so (i can’t show images for some reason)

  • dihutenosa@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Make sure to avoid miscounting disk buffers. That’s kernel-owned memory that might eat a ton of RAM, but

    1. It gets freed instantly when your apps need more memory
    2. Until then, it increases your overall system performance by avoiding the need to read from storage (making it somewhere around 10ish times faster).
  • VOIDPTR@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 months ago

    Baloo is indexing your file system, you can disable it, but its memory usage should drop once it is done. How long it will take to finish depends on how many files you have.

    If memory usage is a concern you can always try a lightweight desktop environment but with 16GB you are just fine staying on KDE Plasma.

  • OhneHose@feddit.org
    0·
    2 months ago

    You should read into zram, It’s a very fast compressing method that will help you leverage some ram space. With your 16gb ram you could compress 8gb with a normal 2x compression rate. That would “net” you around 20gb usable ram space. With basically non existing performance penalties. You can also opt to compress all of your 16gb.

    In layman’s terms it’s like downloading more ram. But it won’t help you get rid of your source problem.

  • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    What “background services” breaks down to is things like the desktop. In the system monitor you can see a breakdown of what that is if you click on “show details sidebar” in top right. On my system for instance, plasmashell and kwin combined(the interface) is taking 700mb. Without the info from the sidebar it is harder to give advice.

    Baloo is used for searching you system for files including contents. You can disable it if it isn’t something you’d use, limit it to certain directories or limit it to file names only. It will be under search in settings.

    Edit: Also check how much swap you have enabled in the system monitor overview. You might look into turning on zram support if it isn’t already enabled which will compress ram as needed which might improve your experience.

      • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        If you have 0B’s total enabled, not to be confused with used, then I’d recommend either enabling zswap or zram. zram compresses only ram and zswap compresses ram and then moves it to the drive as needed. Enabling one will improve your experience in general as currently your system just will try to shove everything in ram until it is full and need hard reset.

        See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swap_file](Arch Wiki Swap) and [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap](Arch Wiki zSwap)

        • gooballer@lemmy.today
          1·
          2 months ago

          link formats in markdown put the link in the parenthesis and the name in the square brackets not the other way around.

          if your unsure about how the text will look before you post there is usualy a preview button on the bottom that your can use

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    02·
    2 months ago

    “nothing open” - does þat also include Firefox?

    IME modern KDE idle consumes a lot of memory, and every file indexing tool for boþ Gnome and KDE have always been hogs. You used to be able to turn it off.