Used memory indication is not really useful

[Mateusz Łącki]

The values shown as "memory used" are not really informative. Roughly speaking

"used" memory (indicated in the tool) = "really used" memory (NOT indicated in the tool) + "cache" (indicated in the tool) + "available" (NOT indicated in the tool)

The tool shows the LHS "used memory" and "cache", but does not show the "available memory". With modern kernels the tendency is to "use" memory as much as possible in various buffers, so the value indicated in that tool has no practical value.

For a user I would presume that "memory" should be indication of "really used" memory, because only that tells him how many application will he be able to run.

Currently my Machine tells me it is using 61 GB of memory, with 20.5 GB in Cache. While all I have open are some basic simple tools like skype, Gnome-Terminal and a few Google Chrome windows. Thing is I have 33GB in "available" (according to TOP), which tells me that I am "really using" around 7GB of memory, which sounds about right.

There is no way to get the 7GB value from gnome-system-monitor.

The gnome-system-monitor should show "really used memory" or at the very least show also "available" memory just below "cache".

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
Package: gnome-system-monitor 42.0-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.15.0-25.25-generic 5.15.30
Uname: Linux 5.15.0-25-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu82
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Wed Apr 20 16:07:09 2022
SourcePackage: gnome-system-monitor
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to jammy on 2022-03-19 (32 days ago)
mtime.conffile..etc.apport.crashdb.conf: 2021-05-03T18:07:38.595923

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, could you also report it upstream on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-system-monitor/-/issues ?