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From: "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Linux doesn't seem to manage memory very well
Date: Fri, 3 May 2024 13:38:00 +0200
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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.