Hi,
I have an AMD64 system[1] that has been running fine on Bullseye for a
few years, and recently following the soft freeze on Bookworm I upgraded
my system to try it out, and the system has been frequently losing
response. Initially I thought it was because of some issue of my
qemu-based Win11 virtual machine as it happens most frequently when it
was running and filed a bug report[2]. But then it happened again
without it running because some other program had slowly used up most of
the memory again, though not as frequently as the VM was running.
Now in retrospect, when I was using Bullseye the total memory was also
mostly used up most of the time, with a few hundreds of megabytes
reported as free and a few Gigs reported as cache, and it has been
running fine. I'm not sure what has changed in Bookworm and having to
manually restart the machine is a pretty annoying and unpleasant
experience.
Does anyone seeing a similar problem as well? What can I do to avoid
this? Any suggest is welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Open the command prompt and run `su` to switch user to root. Then run `sync && echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` as root. This will write RAM caches to the hard drive to free up memory. You have to run this as root as sudo, my preferred method, returns a permission disabled error.
[1] System info from inxi:
CPU: 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with Radeon Graphics (-MT MCP-)
speed/min/max: 1199/1200/4679 MHz Kernel: 6.1.0-5-amd64 x86_64 Up: 7m
Mem: 4844.4/31521.3 MiB (15.4%) Storage: 476.94 GiB (54.5% used) Procs: 535
Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.25
Your system has 32 GB of RAM, it should not be getting used up. Run `free -h` What desktop are you using: KDE, GNOME, LXQT etc? Are you using Wayland or X11? It looks like you have a memory leak in one of your applications. Try running `top` and press `m` to sort by memory utilization.
Tim
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1032400
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Manphiz