memory usage remains high

[prototact]

@dosu Initially, bluefin takes at most 3 gigs of memory to run but after opening and closing applications, memory usage remains high, about 8 gigs or more, while nothing is running. Is this benign? is there a way to force to clean the memory apart from a system restart?

[dosubot[bot]]

This is normal and benign Linux behavior. The kernel uses free RAM as a page cache to speed up disk reads — it holds recently accessed files in memory so they can be served faster if needed again. This cached memory is immediately released when an application actually needs it, so it's not "used" in the way that matters.

You can check this by running:

free -h

Look at the available column rather than "free" — that shows how much memory is truly available (free + reclaimable cache). If "available" is healthy, there's nothing to worry about.

If you still want to manually drop caches (not typically necessary):

sudo sysctl vm.drop_caches=3

This flushes the page cache, dentries, and inodes. It's safe but provides no real benefit — the kernel will just rebuild the cache as you use the system.

TL;DR: tldr free — Linux intentionally fills unused RAM with cache to improve performance. High memory numbers after closing apps almost always reflect cache, not a leak. If free -h shows plenty of "available" memory, everything is working as designed.

For more on Bluefin: https://docs.projectbluefin.io

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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