At the end of last year, my company bought me a new laptop. I looked at the memory usage for my previous system, saw that it hovered between 5GB and 6GB, and figured I could get away with a system with only 8GB RAM (I had had the option with the previous system to upgrade to 16GB, and never did, it just didn’t seem worth it). Between then and now, of course, Meltdown and Spectre happened. Now I find myself pushing over 7GB of memory usage on this new system pretty much constantly, and yesterday it became almost unusable as my memory usage got too high. I never saw that in almost 3 years of use on my prior system.
Having done a little work from home, it seems like my memory use now is higher than it used to be on my home PC, too. It’s possible something else changed, but the obvious culprit to me seems to be these recent patches. I’ve not read anything about increased memory usage related to Meltdown and Spectre, though. Anyone else seeing similar symptoms?