Unusual RAM-Increase and no release afterward

imtotallyuncreative · 2025-08-30 16:49:07

Hello,
I'm facing a problem with my RAM. I have never noticed this problem before.

The Problem started (to my knowledge) with the upgrade of the following packages:

[2025-08-22T20:09:49+0200] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu'
[2025-08-22T20:09:49+0200] [PACMAN] synchronizing package lists
[2025-08-22T20:09:50+0200] [PACMAN] starting full system upgrade
[2025-08-22T20:12:51+0200] [ALPM] running '60-mkinitcpio-remove.hook'...
[2025-08-22T20:12:51+0200] [ALPM] transaction started
[2025-08-22T20:12:51+0200] [ALPM] upgraded edk2-ovmf (202411-1 -> 202505-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:51+0200] [ALPM] upgraded mesa (1:25.1.7-1 -> 1:25.2.1-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:51+0200] [ALPM] upgraded lib32-mesa (1:25.1.7-1 -> 1:25.2.1-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:51+0200] [ALPM] upgraded vulkan-radeon (1:25.1.7-1 -> 1:25.2.1-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:51+0200] [ALPM] upgraded lib32-vulkan-radeon (1:25.1.7-1 -> 1:25.2.1-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:52+0200] [ALPM] upgraded linux (6.16.1.arch1-1 -> 6.16.2.arch1-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:52+0200] [ALPM] upgraded qt6-declarative (6.9.1-2 -> 6.9.1-3)
[2025-08-22T20:12:52+0200] [ALPM] upgraded vulkan-swrast (1:25.1.7-1 -> 1:25.2.1-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:52+0200] [ALPM] upgraded yt-dlp (2025.07.21-1 -> 2025.08.20-1)
[2025-08-22T20:12:53+0200] [ALPM] transaction completed

Systeminfo:

KDE Wayland
Ext4
AMD Ryzen 7700X
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
64 Gigabytes of RAM
I start from TTY without a display manager

The Situation is as follows:

While playing Xonotic on Kernel 6.16.2 my RAM ballooned upwards to about 30 Gigabytes and Xonotic started stuttering (that's why I even noticed it). When closing every application (I think I was having Firefox, Spotify, Konsole with Htop running and of course Xonotic) the RAM was not released. It would go down a little, but would stay at approximately 28 Gigabytes. I then tried to reproduce it and restarted the PC and set a stopwatch. I only started Konsole with Htop and Xonotic. This was about 2.5 Gigabytes maybe, I don't remember it exactly. Over the course of ~70 Minutes my RAM went steadily from normal 2.Something Gigabytes to 20 Gigabytes. After closing Xonotic the used RAM (according to Htop) did not return to the 1.30 Gigabytes of RAM that are allocated when the PC is just started with Plasma running and Konsole and Htop open (I know it won't return to the exact number). I aslo used free -h. Unfortunately I do not have

/proc/meminfo

for every occasion where I observed it.

Yesterday i tested Kernel 6.16.4, it happened again and I took a "snapshot" of the memory, the result (I called it 6-13-4 instead of 6-16-4). I believe this snapshot was taken after I closed everything besides Konsole and Htop:

cat /proc/meminfo > 6-13-4-found.txt

MemTotal:       64965760 kB
MemFree:        41926436 kB
MemAvailable:   45010944 kB
Buffers:          306656 kB
Cached:          3338848 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:          1770264 kB
Inactive:        2531856 kB
Active(anon):     735028 kB
Inactive(anon):        0 kB
Active(file):    1035236 kB
Inactive(file):  2531856 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:      134217724 kB
SwapFree:       134217724 kB
Zswap:                 0 kB
Zswapped:              0 kB
Dirty:               780 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:        638040 kB
Mapped:           471976 kB
Shmem:             78572 kB
KReclaimable:     210756 kB
Slab:             374796 kB
SReclaimable:     210756 kB
SUnreclaim:       164040 kB
KernelStack:       10800 kB
PageTables:        14272 kB
SecPageTables:      3760 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:    166700604 kB
Committed_AS:    4376224 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:      164864 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB
Percpu:            16832 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
AnonHugePages:    186368 kB
ShmemHugePages:        0 kB
ShmemPmdMapped:        0 kB
FileHugePages:    671744 kB
FilePmdMapped:    165888 kB
CmaTotal:              0 kB
CmaFree:               0 kB
Unaccepted:            0 kB
Balloon:               0 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
Hugetlb:               0 kB
DirectMap4k:    18166860 kB
DirectMap2M:    15552512 kB
DirectMap1G:    33554432 kB

The problem does not appear on the LTS-Version (6.12.44-1-lts) of the Kernel from which i am writing this currently. Other programs weren't really tested (at least not with direct supervision, meaning the stopwatch procedure) . I looked briefly to other posts on this board and only saw this but that seems to be a Virtualization/lookingglass issue. In that post, this post was linked. I have not had the time to check if it is related or try the fixes. I have looked at the Kernel Changelog of 6.16.2, there are a few memory changes, maybe this has something to do with it... This is of course only speculation and I apologize if this is unwarranted. I also looked to Kernel Bugzilla briefly and saw nothing which was related.

If I have made mistakes or this entire post should have not been posted I apologize sincerely.

seth · 2025-08-30 19:21:09

Possibly https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 2#p2258742
There's also https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 9#p2243899 but that would allow you to reclaim the RAM from the GTT/GART

Arch Linux

#1 2025-08-30 16:49:07

Unusual RAM-Increase and no release afterward

#2 2025-08-30 19:21:09

Re: Unusual RAM-Increase and no release afterward

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