Android studio adds about 1 gb of ram to my usage upon startup . It only increases from there , even if I leave it empty . It is independent of the size of the project as far as I can tell . It happens if I start up a project with just one source file plus the gradle and xml stuff it makes on its own . The memory usage is mostly by a process named java with the android studio icon in gnome system monitor . Immediately upon opening android studio this process uses 660 MiB RAM and it goes up with time . The android studio process itself uses very little ram while idle . Edit Starting the VM adds about 1 . 2 GiB ram usage by the VM process . Closing it makes the process disappear , as expected . However , the original java process is now 150 MiB bigger even after closing the VM . Additionally , there is now a second java process with no icon using 500 MiB of RAM . The RAM usage of these two processes increases each time I open the VM . Closing android studio now decreases the RAM usage , but it ' s at a much higher level than before opening it . I assume that is just to make it open faster the next time around , which is ok . What I would really like to decrease is the 6 gb RAM usage of android studio without the VM running .