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

On 5/1/24 3:05 PM, D wrote:

  On Wed, 1 May 2024, James Harris wrote:
 

Not a question, just an observation.
>
I say that Linux doesn't seem to handle memory well because my laptop had 8GB RAM (which, frankly, Windows seems to find perfectly adequate for a similar workload). Under Linux the RAM would fill up and then swap space would be used. Then the machine would become largely unresponsive - e.g. taking minutes to switch between windows.
>
So I upgraded the RAM. It now has three times as much (i.e. 24GB)! But even so, RAM has still steadily filled up until reaching the full 24GB. What's more, it's now showing 4.8GB of swap space in use.

 Sounds like some rouge application and not linux. I never had any ram problems with linux given 4, 8 and now 16 gb of ram and I run firefox and xfce. Even ran gnome on 4 gb ram and no problems.

   Agreed ... Linux manages memory perfectly OK. His
   prob is a rogue app, likely failing to de-allocate
   some kind of (largish) buffers. He may need to
   run valgrind, or at least sudo pmap -x <pid>
   several times on suspected apps to see what's
   going on. ps can kind-of be coerced into showing
   the real usage, but it's a lot of flags. top can
   also give you a fair picture.
   Dynamic memory allocation - albeit ancient - can
   be a pain.