How to free up the memory in the best way
There's a couple things you can do. Some of them were already outlined in How can I improve Ubuntu overall system performance?. Here's a few simple suggestions you can try right now:
Switch to a lighter desktop, you don't need to reinstall, you could just install a desktop session such as
xfce
or install metapackage for another flavor, such asXubuntu
edition withsudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
Add more swap, either via partition or swap file. I've a script for adding swap files to make that process easier.
Configure swappiness to help the system handle memory-intensive apps. See also: SwapFaq
Disable certain services. Which services to disable will depend on your needs.
Buy more RAM. Make sure you buy modules with correct frequency and type.
- Consider tuning resource usage for certain processes and niceness values
- Consider some of the cleanup suggestions. BleachBit is a well-known and pretty good utility for that.
I'm just answering this old post to hopefully gain some reputation points... When dealing with low memory, I use this nifty little command to clean caches and buffers, saves me from having to use swap most of the time. I only have to use this command once every 2 or 3 days. I suppose this is what you're looking for?
free -h && sudo sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3 && sudo sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && free -h