Increased idle RAM usage with time on eos Juno

Question

I've been using eOS Juno since feb 2019. FYI, initial RAM usage is at 20% (total RAM 8GB, 7.1GB available), at the end 45-50% (after closing all running applications.)

EDIT: This is an HP laptop, with Quad-Core AMD A8-7410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics(2GB). Model number is HP AF008AX.

Before this, I'd been using eOS 0.4 on a HDD. I decided to install Juno on a new Kingston 240GB SSD. For a while the ram usage was similar to v0.4 but since past 2-3 months I've noticed that if I keep using system for long, then the RAM usage keeps increasing even though I use it for browsing(e.g. Firefox or sometimes Brave browser) and occasional small coding projects on Code or VSCode, the number of tabs on used browser (Firefox/Brave) never go above 10 but RAM usage from start keeps increasing. Sometimes, on weekends system stays on for about 10+ hours, which means that I've to restart the system to avoid stuttering and lag due high unrecoverable RAM (and processor) usage.

Even if I close all the applications, the RAM recovered is about same as used as all the applications' usage in start. And there's an amount of RAM that can't be recovered until I restart my system.

Please guide me how/why it is happening and if there's a way to avoid it or if its normal. Any help is appreciated.

Edit: gala has 11 instances shown in htop with each taking 2.8%, could that be a reason?

Answer 1

I'm making this an answer because I don't have enough reputation to comment. This sounds like a memory leak. A good first step is to install and run htop to see if any processes are consuming quite a bit of memory. From the terminal:

sudo apt install htop

and then once you've installed it, htop. Once in htop, press F6 on the keyboard, and scroll down and select percent_mem.

If nothing sticks out there, it might be a memory leak in one of the drivers. Graphics drivers are quite likely the fault (I've had similar issues before with my AMD GPU). Could you check what GPU driver is installed?

sudo apt install mesa-utils
glxinfo | grep -i "vendor\|rendering"

Could you mention what your computer mainboard is, and if you have any other hardware installed? Edit: Is this in a laptop? What computer is it?

Another question I referenced to make this answer: xorg - How to check the information of current installed video drivers? - Ask Ubuntu

Answer 2

I updated my kernel to kernel v4.18 on my Acer laptop with a AMD A12 and Radeon RX and it gave me all types of problems, went back to 4.15 and the problems stopped. I would try down grading your kernel to the default kernel and see if that helps.