Comment by Telaneo
18 hours ago
It only postpones the inevitable. It doean't actually fix it. I went for a 64 GB swapfile to hopefully not have to worry about it any more, only to find my swapfile full after a few days anyway, even when configuring swappiness to a minimum. Shit just piles up for no apparent reason. I'm sure someone smarter than me can diagnose the problem, but I just decided to reduce the swapfile size to a more sensible value and reboot every now and then. I should probably try Zram or whatever to see if that mitigates the problem.
Oh, that's just a garden variety memory leak.
Most applications these days are very good about that; you likely have just a single app that you use regularly that leaks. If you kill the process the memory will be recovered, save for some allocations the kernel maintains.
"top" or maybe "slabtop" will find the offending, very very broken, program that's leaking memory like crazy, making your system doomed no matter what you do or how much physical memory you install.
It's not inevitable for most use cases.