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

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 03/05/2024 00:23, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

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.
 
I don't use web browsers to play video. 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.
 

I use browsers to play videos. RAM usage is not massive. CPU usage is.

Perhaps RAM usage isn't that great on the scale of systems with tens
of GB of RAM. Compared to 2GB I think it may be significant because
when I tried to transcode a 1920x1080 video in AV1 format to
lower-res MPEG4 on a VPS with 1GB RAM + 1GB swap space, ffmpeg
(v. 4) surprised me by running out of RAM. Of course it could be a
bug in that decoder, but not having tackled much AV1 video before I
concluded that high resolutions plus modern video codecs requires
lots of RAM.

What chews memory are *commercial* websites loaded with (deliberately)
buggy javaScript that cause javaScript engines to go into meltdown. How
that is handled is browser dependent.
 
Ublock Origin helps massively, but is not a complete answer.
What is a massive help at leats in Mint Mate is the System Monitor
widget that I keep in the task bar permanently displaying CPU, RAM and
Network usage as teeny graphs.
It is very easy to see when memory is all grabbed by a process rather
than simply cache
And monitor how much gets released when you close a website page.

There's also about:performance in Firefox. I do use NoScript with
all my browsing in Firefox.

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