Re: Linux doesn't seem to manage memory very well

On 2024-05-03 01:23, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

On 2024-05-02 16:06, James Harris wrote:

>
Yes, I am (at least tentatively) blaming Linux but not for the problem
you think. I wouldn't expect Linux to prevent programs from gobbling up
memory but I would expect it to manage memory hogs more gracefully than
it does. IME Windows handles the same situation better - and that may be
down to the different designs of their paging systems.
>
Don't get me wrong. I much prefer Linux to Windows and have often seen
Windows get into a worse situation under different circumstances. But
for page management ISTM that the design of Linux's paging subsystem may
not be the best.

>
You can configure Linux to crash the application that is behaving badly
by grabbing all the memory. It is up to you, the boss.
>
The philosophy is not to nanny care for you. It does what you asked.
More memory? Yes sir. Till death does us part. Your orders will be obeyed.
>
:-)

 I didn't know there was an option not to have it do that (via the
Out Of Memory Reaper). It seems the alternatives are to reboot or
risk the kernel crashing, so your description seems about right.
 https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/it-infrastructure/dev-oom-killer.html
 The OP has noted now that the process that consumes their RAM is
Chrome or Firefox. I've not seen a detailed description of why it
happens, but I've long noted that Firefox seems to expand its RAM
usage to the available space, but different from a memory leak in
that it usually leaves a certain amount free. I assume that this
in intended behaviour. I run current Firefox on a PC with 2GB RAM
and I don't have it getting killed by the kernel, nor do I have
problems with kernel crashes/reboots. I've also tried running
recent Firefox on a PC with 512MB RAM and noticed that it performs
much worse than with 2GB RAM, slowing down to a crawl while loading
some websites, suggesting that it really does need more RAM in that
case.

Firefox uses a lot of memory.
One problem is memory fragmentation. It reserves many chunks then eventually frees many, but they may not being contiguous, so maybe they can not be reused, so it requests more memory.
When I started using Linux, back in 1998, I did notice that Linux needed more memory than Windows to work right. I had to improve my hardware because of that. My previous computer had 8 GB and it was not enough, it was swapping. So now I have a machine with 64.

 I don't use web browsers to play video.

No youtube? :-)

If you're streaming super
high resolution video through your browser with the latest and
greatest compression algorithms, then it probably has the right
to chew up a lot of RAM.
 

--
Cheers, Carlos.