Hi, I have been a regular user of qubes for six months. It is my primary system for IT work, which I installed on a Lenovo v50s computer with 64GB RAM. I don’t think there is a better computer to work on; I put each application in a separate qubes and this way I can quickly work on 20 running applications simultaneously. However, privately I own a DELL E6520 with 16GB Ram. After running only the firefox browser, the ram consumption is 16GB (!). I am an administrator by profession and despite this, I cannot understand such a high consumption. Why does sys-firewall consume 3 to 4GB on startup? How should I organize my work on this laptop?
There are two 8GB bones in the laptop - it is almost impossible to find a 32GBor 16GB bone… What could I do with this?
Don’t worry about it, that’s because sys-firewall, personal and sys-whonix (except dom0) are configured with memory-ballooning (aka balancing), which will give the qube maximum RAM when there’s free RAM, and ask it to hand out unused RAM when there is insufficient RAM (that’s, when running qubes’ max RAMs adding up exceeds your physical RAM).
A better description can be found here: