high memory consumption

[Philippe]

When I plug in my external hard drive and copy files from it to my HD, my RAM is somehow fully used (and my computer is reaaaly slow).
"top" does not report any application using up a lot of memory.
"free -h" reports there is only 130M free memory (7.6G used).
After the copy finishes, these figures don't change.
When I unmount and unplug the external hard drive, the free memory rises back to 4.1G.

I tried a second time right after rebooting and the same thing happens.

[Jeremy Wootten (jeremywootten)]

There are a number of related reports e.g. 1404588, 1404603.

If you are copying/moving a large number of top-level files/directories then some of the memory usage will be down to undo manager storing a large number of undo actions but I am not sure this is the whole story. There is quite a large bounty on this issue but so far no-one has solved it.

[Jeremy Wootten (jeremywootten)]

Views also cache file information both in the associated async directory and in their model so any open tab showing a directory with a lot (tens or hundreds of thousands) of top-level files will consume significant amounts of memory, although this should be freed once the tab is closed (subject to a delay for garbage collection).

[Jeremy Wootten (jeremywootten)]

When you unmount your external drive, this will close any view displaying a location on that drive recovering the associated memory.

[Jeremy Wootten (jeremywootten)]

I have found also that Icon View uses a lot of memory which is not reclaimed - this needs investigating but may be a bug in Gtk.IconView itself as List and Column View use less memory and share a lot of code in Files.