**NOTE: i have only used linux for about a year or so and im not a power user, im basically a tired windows user but i know more stuff than most beginners i feel like? like not a lot more but a little bit ** so when i don’t have anything open my memory usage is like 4-5GB out of 16, which makes it pretty bad when i want to play games (even minecraft can make it so my pc use 99% memory so i have to hard reset, although i might have fixed that) and/or when i want some demanding theming things (like a live wallpaper). “Background services” is using like 4GB and “baloo_file_extractor” is using like 1GB out of the 4. I have done a tiny tiny bit of research and ive found out that baloo is a file indexing thingo, but idrk what file indexing is used for so i don’t know if i should disable it

distro: endeavourOS de: kde plasma wayland ram: 16gb of something (i have a prebuilt so idk what ddr it is or whatever)

if you need more info then please say so (i can’t show images for some reason)

  • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    What “background services” breaks down to is things like the desktop. In the system monitor you can see a breakdown of what that is if you click on “show details sidebar” in top right. On my system for instance, plasmashell and kwin combined(the interface) is taking 700mb. Without the info from the sidebar it is harder to give advice.

    Baloo is used for searching you system for files including contents. You can disable it if it isn’t something you’d use, limit it to certain directories or limit it to file names only. It will be under search in settings.

    Edit: Also check how much swap you have enabled in the system monitor overview. You might look into turning on zram support if it isn’t already enabled which will compress ram as needed which might improve your experience.

    • Björn@swg-empire.de
      3·
      1 day ago

      Edit: Also check how much swap you have enabled in the system monitor overview. You might look into turning on zram support if it isn’t already enabled which will compress ram as needed which might improve your experience.

      If they have swap then zswap is better than zram because it works better with the Linux memory management.

      Don’t know when it’s ready, but they’re working on a way for zswap to work without a swap disk set up. When that is done there shouldn’t be any reason left to use zram at all. At least not as a swap disk.

      • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        1 day ago

        My old 8GB laptop runs amazingly well with an 8GB swap file and Zswap enabled. If you set up both with 16GB of RAM, your machine should be able to handle most anything easily.

      • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        If you have 0B’s total enabled, not to be confused with used, then I’d recommend either enabling zswap or zram. zram compresses only ram and zswap compresses ram and then moves it to the drive as needed. Enabling one will improve your experience in general as currently your system just will try to shove everything in ram until it is full and need hard reset.

        See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swap_file](Arch Wiki Swap) and [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap](Arch Wiki zSwap)