Is Nitrux eating my RAM?

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We believe performance shouldn’t be an afterthought. In Nitrux, it’s engineered from the ground up. We’ve fine-tuned everything from the kernel and filesystem to memory management, all with one goal: to make your system feel as fast, responsive, and stable as possible. So, what does all that tuning actually mean for you?

A Smoother, Stutter-Free Experience

We’ve focused on eliminating “micro-stutters” and system “hiccups” to deliver a smooth, fluid desktop experience.

Optimized kernel scheduler: By tuning RCU (Read-Copy-Update) and reducing memory compaction overhead, we reduced “jitter” that can cause stutters in games, audio production, and other real-time tasks.
Smarter CPU scheduling: We enable AMD Preferred Core functionality, ensuring your applications automatically use the fastest cores on your Ryzen CPU.
Efficient multithreading: Improved memory locking and Transparent Hugepages (THP) help large, multi-threaded applications (such as games, renderers, and IDEs) run more efficiently with lower overhead.

Intelligent & Durable Storage

We use a “best-of-both-worlds” filesystem strategy to maximize performance and data safety, using XFS for the OS and the modern F2FS for your data.

Faster boot and app loading: We use zstd compression on your data, which not only saves disk space but also speeds up I/O, as the CPU can decompress data faster than the disk can read the uncompressed version.
Protects your data: Checksums are applied to compressed data to detect silent data corruption.
Longer SSD life: We disable synchronous access time updates (atime) and use an advanced garbage collector, which significantly reduces unnecessary “chatter” and writes to your SSD, improving its lifespan and performance.

Faster, More Reliable Networking

We tuned Nitrux to optimize your high-speed internet connection, especially under heavy load.

Maximized throughput: By increasing TCP buffers and packet queues, we ensure your system can handle fast (gigabit+) network traffic, reducing packet loss and improving overall stability.
Lower latency: We’ve enabled settings that eliminate initial handshake delays and improve congestion recovery, making web browsing and online gaming feel more responsive.

Smart Memory Management

Nitrux’s philosophy is: When RAM is uncached, it gets wasted. Nitrux is tuned to use your idle memory productively as a high-speed cache.

Enabled zswap by default, which compresses rarely used memory in RAM, avoiding the need to write to a slow disk swap file.
Apps stay in RAM: We’ve aggressively lowered swappiness, telling the kernel to avoid swapping your applications to disk. It will (correctly) clear disposable file caches first.
Reduces disk I/O: We’ve changed “dirty page” settings to allow the system to write changes to disk more efficiently in the background, preventing your applications from “hitching” while waiting for a file to save.

It might seem counterintuitive, but the increased RAM you’ll see is a sign of efficiency, not waste. Historically, many people have viewed high memory usage as bloat. And on other operating systems, it was often the case. In Nitrux, this is a conscious design choice. We’re putting that wasted RAM to work to give you a faster, more responsive system.