r/archlinux • u/activedusk • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Do you optimize RAM usage for your system?
Hello,
A big part of Arch Linux appeal is debloating and being able to install only the packages required without anything extra that distros tend to add. I recently installed Arch while distro hopping and was surprised by the difference with other more mainstream distros, specifically using i3 tiling window manager. I distinctly remember having arround 400MB to 500MB idle RAM usage with other distros like Linux Mint, however on Arch it got down to around 290MB when idle, this seems amazing in 2026 since most DEs seem to creep up their resource requirements and for context Windows is arround 5GB now when idling on the desktop.
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u/RidersOfAmaria 1d ago edited 1d ago
I definitely find that most electron RAM hogging programs also tend to be ad riddled privacy nightmares, so while I've got 64 gigs of RAM because I basically hopped on the last chopper out of Saigon when I upgraded just before the AI boom, I find myself not really using that many things which demand a ton of RAM because I don't want to sign into a fucking Google account to listen to my music, I just pirate high quality versions and run them in Strawberry and stuff. For the most part, the privacy respecting FOSS stuff is just what I prefer anyway, and usually that means my desktop is chilling at like 10-15% RAM usage due to a distinct lack of electron slop.
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u/activedusk 1d ago
I used to have large mp3 song collections back in the day and winamp was on most of the time. When artists started putting their stuff on youtube, at some point I just switched to youtube playlists. Now I am going back to having the files locally, youtube is running slower than in the past due to ads despite my connection being over 10 times faster than mid to late 2000s. I just can t trust big tech with providing the service of hosting anymore, a lot of things are going backwards, but well, that s another topic.
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u/RidersOfAmaria 1d ago edited 1d ago
yt-dlp --extract-audio on your playlist is so easy, MusicBrainz Picard is really good at scanning all of them and pulling album art and everything, and you can just throw it all into Strawberry. It's like a five minute package installing and audio ripping adventure. I do discover new music on youtube every now and then, but I just make a playlist of new stuff and then repeat the process every couple months, burn all that onto CDs and use them in my car. I might have all the ram I could imagine using, but I just can't help myself from using minimalist software and CDs and XFCE. Idk I guess I'm just set in my ways.
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u/VolcanoCarpenter 1d ago
Off-topic but glad I'm not the only one who does this. It's insane how decoding a music file somehow eats up gigabytes of RAM and constantly spikes the CPU. Jesus, I could get the exact same audio out of a $2 MP3 decoder board! Is my PC genuinely only like 10x more powerful than those cheap modules? Even factoring in the EQ, live lyrics, and other bloat, the math just doesn't math.
Honestly, streaming is only good for discovering new tracks at this point. Once I have my playlists dialed in, I just download the highest quality files locally, refine the metadata with MP3 tag editor and play them on whatever player (usually mpv or something).
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u/RidersOfAmaria 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah it's kinda bonkers. I started doing it just out of practicality because I have an old car and CDs were just the most convenient way to do music, since connecting my phone to the audio jack would use the USB-C port, and Pixel phones that support Graphene don't have aux ports so I can't charge while I play music, but I see absolutely 0 appeal in paying for a streaming service ever. I also use a jellyfin server for most shows and movies for the same reason, it just ain't worth dealing with these tech companies.
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u/Gordon_Drummond 1d ago edited 1d ago
I use a P8P with GOS and I bought one of those $20 ugreen LDAC capable bluetooth receivers that plugs into a usb port and your aux port and gives basically lossless 24bit-96kHz quality playback. Might allow you to charge and play, I have two 12V adapters in my 17 yo car but even if you only have one they sell PD adapters with one USB-A and one USB-C port for like $10 at any electronics store.
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u/RidersOfAmaria 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't ever use bluetooth anything. Too many privacy and security concerns. I've got a printer that doesn't connect to the internet and I keep a handgun in the drawer in case it gets any funny ideas type shit. There's probably usb charging/aux splitter adapters but honestly the CDs work great and I don't gotta plug it in every time. The built in control dial on the radio and physical buttons are nice.
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u/Internal_Leke 1d ago
It matters if you have the need for the free RAM (system with low RAM). With 24GB of RAM, I don't really see a point in trying to save RAM consumption intentionally.
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u/activedusk 1d ago edited 1d ago
I got traumatized back when using Windows XP 32bit with 128MB of RAM, been doing RAM usage optimization since regardless of OS I use, it's part of my "mechanical sympathy" towards the hardware.
I suppose it's a sign I'm old.
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u/archover 1d ago
Exactly. The pursuit of ram use reduction in modern systems is generally not a good use of time.
Good day.
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u/tomikaka 1d ago
I optimized my 32GB system so I use more memory. Mostly caching. Remember unused ram is wasted ram.
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u/Cruffe 1d ago
I've got 64GB of RAM, for most things I'm nowhere close to using all of it.
The only time I ever get close to using all of it is when I run local AI video generation workflows. Even then I don't really need to optimize RAM usage because a lot of the other stuff gets put into swap when I'm running that to make room for the current task.
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u/owjfaigs222 1d ago
Look at this rich guy flexing
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u/Cruffe 1d ago
Not rich, just got lucky buying it a year ago right before prices started going up, decided to build a new PC at just the right time. That same exact set of RAM sticks is now worth 5x what I paid for it, as much as all the rest of the components (minus the GPU) and I wouldn't be buying that now if I were to build a PC today.
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u/FryBoyter 1d ago
That was the case for me, too. And since the price difference between 32 and 64 GB of RAM was pretty small back then, I decided to go with 64 GB.
And I wouldn't build a new computer right now at all. I'd rather reuse the old parts I already have. With what those same RAM modules cost now, I could have paid for almost the entire upgrade back then. I'm not going along with this price madness.
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u/UndefFox 1d ago
I don't try to micro optimize my usage. I just disable any service that I don't need and it's already enough to avoid most of the unnecessary resources waste.
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u/un-important-human 1d ago
yes 96GB OF ram can only go so far>
Stop beeing obsessed to preserve ram, USE IT, you paid for it, use it haaard.
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u/VendorNeutral 1d ago
I do not actively go out of my way to save RAM on my desktop. It's mostly for browsing the web and gaming. Actual work happens on my work laptop, but that thing has 64 GiB RAM, so even a full blown KDE setup with a bunch of work related electron apps don't make a difference. I run Arch on a home server, too, where RAM is a bit more of an issue, but the base system runs what it has to, so that's that, and whatever services run in Docker already come with plenty overhead for the sake of convenience. I mean, strictly speaking, we could run everything off a single postresql instance and a single redis, but we containerize for a reason.
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u/serge-mv 1d ago
I don't particularly go crazy for every megabyte of ram, but I try not to use bloated software that just eats system resources for no reason. Use software within the same family so that I wouldn't have 25 different frameworks and backends and servers running as dependencies for a couple of apps.
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u/oriunn 1d ago
I reduced RAM consumption from 400 to 150 MB (on tty) on Void Linux, I made my own .config for the Linux kernel (zen-kernel) and compiled it only with the modules and parameters needed for me and my hardware, and with the -02 flag --march=native
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u/activedusk 13h ago
I think I tried over 3 times to compile my own kernel but they failed to boot each time, I followed youtube tutorials and written ones, maybe they were out of date, idk, the compiling worked but the resulting kernels failed to work. Have not tried void or gentoo, maybe these work better for this purpose. Per chance can you share what wiki or tutorial you used or self taught and simply combed every option?
Also, how do you measure ram usage? Some tools add more ram of their own to measure the ram compared to others, example fastfetch vs htop or top.
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u/ang-p 13h ago edited 13h ago
1) "however on Arch"
You use cachyos - Wrong subreddit.
You use cachyos because....? They do things "better, uh? ASK THEM!
2) "do you optimize RAM"
Yes - like I optimise the air in my tyres...
I put it in, seal the hole I used to put it in, and leave it.... Twonk.
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u/activedusk 13h ago
I am distro hopping and was using Arch when I made the post. Right now using Mint XFCE. At any rate, here, took this screenshot yesterday
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u/ang-p 13h ago edited 13h ago
So you were completely wasting the time of the people contributing to your cachyos post?
Not to mention half of your posts there were complete shit - you got
halfall of that crap off Clauge or ChatGPTRight now using Mint XFCE
And this Arch one...
Timewaster.
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u/activedusk 13h ago edited 13h ago
It is called distro hopping for a reason (which I mentioned in the original post above), the info I provided was from said distros. Idk what you're raging about, must be that so called reddit griefting for engagement.
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u/ang-p 13h ago
Why ask for boot times - when by the time they have responded you are 2 distros down the road? Dumb flex anyway...
Why ask about memory optimising when you are on a different distro the next day?
Both those things are just dumb....
Some of your other posts are simple bullshitting or absolute trash
Besides - what is that shit about "booster"?
OP has some kind of habit of making guides for stuff they barely learned .... i can confidently say: steer clear people!1
u/activedusk 13h ago
Are you so attached to a distro that you can t accept "betrayal"? I use Mint, Manjaro, openSUSE more than CachyOS and yesterday was the first time I installed Arch just to try it. I can do all that and still talk about them invidividually, what is the conflict or problem? Loyalty to an operating system? They are all Linux.
I also noticed griefters that latch on to my posts for the most insane reasons, like helping others by making tutorials or that I use AI generated art as wallpapers, reddit is full of crazies. If you cared about Linux adoption, you would try to help others more rather than whatever you re doing with these comments.
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u/FryBoyter 1d ago
In my opinion, RAM is meant to be used. That’s why I don’t care at all how much RAM is being used as long as there aren’t any problems. Especially since using a lot of RAM can actually be an advantage.
Furthermore, I consider the term “bloat” to be completely meaningless, since there’s no objective definition for it. What one user considers bloat may be an important feature for another user.
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u/archover 1d ago edited 23h ago
+1 Agree on the ram part and on the bloat part.
For bloat, we are the admins of our systems so we're responsible for any bloat we install. Maybe some don't know about
# pacman -Rns <whatever>My ram usage:
user@T14-CRU781.local ~> free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15200 3008 9947 51 2289 12192 Swap: 4095 0 4095With Cinnamon, Firefox, KeepassXC and Chromium open. So I don't feel 3008 Used is a problem or notable at all.
To OP and question about optimizing system for ram: No. I feel I have better uses for my time. But do what you enjoy!
Enjoy your posts and good day.
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u/linhusp3 1d ago
Isn't this take just make windows the best system? Since "ram is mean to be used" and windows consumes the most ram possible so it has an advantage over every other system?
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u/FryBoyter 1d ago
Windows' memory management is actually pretty good. Unfortunately, the problem with Windows is that when a version of Windows is preinstalled by the hardware manufacturer, it usually comes with a lot of extra junk which gets started automatically. I therefore generally recommend replacing the preinstalled version of Windows with a vanilla version.
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u/activedusk 1d ago
Technically that's the part that is being criticized because those extra memory resources used are not made to make everyday tasks faster but processes that are considered spyware like telemetry, advertisements, etc.
There is some truth regarding pre loading some programs into RAM for faster launching, but Idk if I noticed any slow downs on Arch with ~300MB of memory at idle when launching file manager, web browser, etc. I can't vouch for Steam though, on my system it takes like 10s to launch, though that might be influenced by login time, namely internet connection and server response more so than starting the process itself.
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u/VolcanoCarpenter 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm guessing a lot here are going to pile on OP with the usual "RAM is meant to be used, so why bother saving it" take. But "RAM being used because the software is bloated" and "RAM being used by the user's actual workload" are two completely different things. Bait-and-switch.
If some Modern-Design (TM) Vibe-Coded (TM) AI-powered (TM) Electron Calculator eats 2 GB of RAM just by being open, I'd uninstall it without a second thought, even if I had 64 GB or more. My RAM is for development tools, compilers, office software, design tools, and media, not for absurdly bloated apps.