Can you see with top or ps what program is eating up all the RAM? Probably some bug you may report.
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Here is what I started with:
And what I have today after 3 suspends:
xfwm is XFCE's window manager, and it's eating almost 30% of the total system memory, so that's the prime suspect (I'm not exactly sure how much it interacts with other apps, so it's possible something else is forcing xfwm to use all that memory, but that is IMHO unlikely).
An ugly "fix" is to log out and log back in (yes, not much better than just rebooting), or you could try to somehow restart xfwm - running xfvm --replace in terminal might work.
Edit: there's an issue on the Manjaro forums that might be related: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/xfwm4-memory-leak-since-4-20/173910/7
Of course it would be a Nvidia driver issue.
Thought about getting a AMD card but as I had only had one major issue with my previous 1070 (that was fixed by reloading my Timeshift snapshot then not upgrading the driver until the next version) so I thought that I would continue with Nvidia.
Eh, I can't change it for now but at least I know what is causing it and can work around it.
Thanks for the assist.
Will check after work today.
My guess it just doesn't evict stuff from before the suspend, starts re-loading stuff after the resume, which makes the apparent amount "used" go up.
On a normal linux system, "free" RAM will over time drop down to zero, as the kernel puts the extra memory available to use. But it doesn't mean there isn't room to evict less-needed stuff if necessary.
AFAIK linux only starts actively evicting RAM once it fills up.
Like the other guy mentioned, drill down and see if you can find the actual program causing the problem.
What is the output of "free -h"?
Just made a reply to Björn Tantau.
What desktop environment are you using?
XFCE