What is eating my RAM today?

There has been a tweet doing the rounds about how people are doing with managing their RAM. Generally speaking I have a couple of machines, varying from 4-16GB or RAM. As you can expect I don’t have many spare GB of RAM knocking about, pretty much ever.

# Wtf is eating up my RAM?
ps aux | awk '{print $6/1024 " MB\t\t" $11}' | sort -rn | head -25#Linux #sysadmin @nixcraft @UnixToolTip

— Jaxx Armstrong (@JaxxArmstrong) January 8, 2019

ps aux | awk '{print $6/1024 " MB\t\t" $11}' | sort -rn | head -10 
593.508 MB		/usr/lib/slack/slack
528.391 MB		/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
491.52 MB		/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
416.336 MB		/opt/brave.com/brave/brave
388.254 MB		/usr/bin/gnome-shell
339.266 MB		/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
337.309 MB		/opt/brave.com/brave/brave
301.047 MB		/usr/lib/slack/slack
249.516 MB		/opt/brave.com/brave/brave

Oh Slack… The email killer? Well you are also the largest consumer of my RAM. Do you need a whole GB for messaging? As you can also see, I run both Brave Browser (which is excellent and you should probably also use) and Firefox (which is pretty solid and separate enough from Brave/Chromium/Chrome to provide a nicer distraction).

I guess that is provided without comment.