Stefan Monnier writes:
> I used to have 8 GB on the system, and it would start to thrash at > about 7+ GB usage. I recently ugrade to 16 GB; memory usage is > currently over 8 GB, and it seems to be slowly but steadily increasing. Presumably you bought 16GB to make use of it, right? So it's only natural for your OS to try and put that memory to use. Any "free memory" is memory that could potentially be used for something more useful (IOW "free" = "wasted" in some sense). It's normal for memory use to increase over time, as your OS finds more things to put into it.
That was my first intuition, too. There is even a classic website about this very topic: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
HOWEVER, given that the OP mentions looking at the RSS sizes I think the classic "all memory used" issue is already ruled-out. The issue seems to be modern webbrowsers which could be considered OSes on their own already hence they also claim more resources whenever it is useful for them.
Firefox takes just above 1600 MiB here with only six tabs open for four hours. Yet I am pretty sure it would take less were this a "lower-end" system e.g. fewer CPU cores would cause fewer processes to be spawned and hence the memory efficiency might be better in such cases.
HTH and YMMV Linux-Fan öö [...]
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