Ubuntu Huge Memory Use

Question

I'm having some issue with Ubuntu. I am learning web developing and decided to use Ubuntu as my OS (on a different drive I have W10). I tried both Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 17.04 (although I just got an update).

My problem is that running 3 tabs in Chrome, 2 terminals doing nothing and VSCode running a create-react-app development server would do this:

Slowing down my computer to the point that I can't do anything. (I believe that 4GB of RAM is more than enough for what I need)

On W10 I can run a lot of more applications and Chrome Tabs without any issue but with Ubuntu for some reason I can't.

My PC specs:

As of writing this, this is what System Monitor shows me:

Maybe one of this "Additional Drivers" is causing this issue(?):

I hope someone has an idea of why this is going on, because I really want to use Ubuntu.

Thanks!

Answer 1

It looks like one or more applications have a memory leak. This bug may have been fixed already. Try

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Answer 2

Something that I encountered with using Ubuntu is that when I killed Firefox from htop, it kept the tabs that were open in RAM (not cache), so that "free" would show about 2.8G RAM usage. When I reopened Firefox the two tabs opened right back up and I was surprised that they stayed around. Once I closed down Firefox properly, the RAM was freed and I was back down to my usual 1.8G.

(Adding as an answer since I can't comment)