Abnormally high ram usage on idle (NixOS)

DeaDvey@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 29 points –

My computer over the last week has (after using the computer for a few hours) shown very high ram usage, around 50 - 60% out of 32GB, even though nothing in htop appears to be the culprit with the highest consumer being Firefox at 1.6% ram, even in a tty, around half of my ram is being used up even though no process shows over 0.1% ram. Rebooting does seem to work, but I'd prefer not to every few hours. Do you think it might be an issue with hardware? I did build my pc so perhaps something's broken?

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How would I find this out?

Run free -m and look at the output. That will tell you how much memory is used by programs, how much is being used as cache, and how much is available. The memory used as cache will be freed if a program needs it.

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           32032       20961        2048         464        9022       10152
Swap:           2048         138        1909

Here's the output

Something's using a lot of memory. It's not just buffer/cache memory. That's definitely not normal.

Did it just recently start using that much memory? I would suspect that something has a memory leak.