It’s still just an OS. The ol’ dentries/pagecache/inodes caching can bloat your RAM usage out, especially in combination with the default for swappiness and vfs_pressure, not to mention the kernel slab. sk_buff is quite untunable depending on the particular kernel. That on top of any badly behaved applications that request transparent huge pages but don’t properly defragment their space you can end up with fairly huge bloat, especially if the app you are using forks and changes memory often. It’s hard to just “Linux uses no memory and that’s that!” When it gives you a mile of rope to hang yourself with.
It’s still just an OS. The ol’ dentries/pagecache/inodes caching can bloat your RAM usage out, especially in combination with the default for swappiness and vfs_pressure, not to mention the kernel slab. sk_buff is quite untunable depending on the particular kernel. That on top of any badly behaved applications that request transparent huge pages but don’t properly defragment their space you can end up with fairly huge bloat, especially if the app you are using forks and changes memory often. It’s hard to just “Linux uses no memory and that’s that!” When it gives you a mile of rope to hang yourself with.