% free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 125Gi 15Gi 90Gi 523Mi 22Gi 110Gi Swap: 63Gi 0B 63GiI’ll use it eventually. Just gotta let the disk cache warm up.
you just need more things to run on it
the rest is electron
Gives a lot of Space for running Virtual machines.
Also browsers can chew that up fast if you have a lot of tabs, Firefox has managed to do it a few times. At least until I started limiting its RAM to 8GB (best decision ever)
Limit Firefox to 8GB of RAM .desktop file
[Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Name=Firefox RAM limit 8GB GenericName=Firefox Ram limit 8GB Comment=Limit RAM for Firefox to 8GB; Exec=systemd-run --user --scope -p MemoryLimit=8G firefox Icon=firefox Type=Application Terminal=false Categories=Utility;Development; StartupWMClass=Firefox(To use it with other apps like Chrome or Electron apps just replace the command at the end, and startup class with the ones from the program you’d like to run. Icon and Name changes are optional but might be desirable so you remember what app it is for).
Alternatively you can open
about:configand limit memory usage there. For example limit in-memory cache.EDIT: it seems firefox doesn’t allow to set RAM limits yet, only cache sizes
Something I didn’t consider when answering earlier is that even if Firefox did have good RAM usage limiting built-in I probably still wouldn’t use it or recommend it, because one of Firefox’s biggest problems is that it leaks. And memory leaks will not be negated by Firefox’s built-in RAM limiter but they will be by systemd’s (or anything else you might be using instead) Firefox would still crash in the event of a leak but it’s still better than it taking gnome or other apps with it, or freezing your system entirely.
That’s good to know, I don’t know how well it would work though I feel like I enabled something about closing background tabs to reduce memory load (it might have been what you said, it might have been something else I don’t really remember) and it helped a little bit but it still ended up chewing up a lot of memory.
Setting the limit though did help immediately. And stop the overconsumption problems, occasionally a couple of tabs crash here and there but it doesn’t freeze or worse cause other apps to slow down and freeze. Which did happen before.
Oh my god thanks but what if someone had a systemd free system
It might be harder for them but there are similar tools that they could use to limit it. One I’ve seen people use is firejail, a tool designed for sandboxing processes and applications.
I’ve personally never tried it myself though so I can’t attest to how well it works, either for this purpose or sandboxing in general.
Oh, I was talking about runit,sysvinit and openrc systems
systemd-run? Wtf?
Hey, thanks for this.
Does it kill Firefox if it tries to go over the limit? I think I tried this once and if there is a memory leak it just closes itself (which is batter than hogging the whole system, bit still)
No, it just limits the amount of RAM that Firefox (or whatever other application you launch with these parameters) will see.
A few Firefox tabs may crash occasionally as a side effect. And obviously if Firefox eats up all of the 8GB it’s allocated it may crash itself though usually it doesn’t and tabs will crash before the browser crashes.
Thanks I understand now, I’ll have to try it again
I think Firefox only sees 8 GB and limits itself ideally. So if it goes over it just unloads unused tabs and such.
I can confirm this, the first time I tried it out I accidentally set it to 1 GB, Firefox could only see that amount of memory. Though limiting Firefox to only 1GB its a very bad idea and it can cause it to crash it’s not because it’s trying to go over though it’s just because it ran out of memory.
8GB is what I would consider the safe minimum for web browsing. If you said it lower you’ll have performance losses. Setting it higher though will only chew up valuable System RAM by inactive tabs.
That’s how I got a free netbook. The netbook had 32GB flash with windows and office occupying 27+GB. Then windows wanted to do an update - with an 8+GB file. Spot the problem. And windows can get quite annoying with updates. As the netbook could not be expanded, and attempts to redirect the update to a USB stick did not work, a newer netbook was bought, and I got the old one. Linux plus libreoffice plus a bunch of extras happily sat in 4GB…
I wish I was a cat
I wish you were a cat too
…name checks out
i think you might be able to run kde plasma with that!
Fun fact, KDE is very lightweight. More so than a lot of folks give it credit for
plasma wayland just doesn’t work with orca and x11 uses 7× your system resources
It’s amazing. Until there is a conflict with mismatched qt libraries.
Better add 32 GB Zram to be safe tho
I use Kde plasma so I’m allowed to make fun of it
i mean, some games (cough cough factorio cough cough) manage to use up about 25GB of ram on my system, so it’s nice to have a buffer. now, my 64GB may be considered a bit overkill but i call it future proofing
I upgraded to 64 GB a few months ago, also thinking it would be future proof for a while. However, I entirely exhuasted it two weeks ago 😑
tf are you doing
some c++ and android coding on a few projects, plus firefox, plus the other minor stuff like translator, goldendict, …
K8s clusters, probably.
My work takes 40 gig and I can still play Factorio while working :)
yeah probably because of all the mods i play with, and the the absolute overkill i manufacturer everything with
Java would like to hog the couch
Minimum requirements to run
hello worldin Java
One of the cushions is your browser, the other half some IDE you use to write an one-liner.
Plenty of room left over for my Chrome tabs
Four of them.
Once you fire up a webpage it’ll just dump garbage all over the couch.
Microsoft Flight Simulator: A whole airplane on the couch
well it’s in the name
“Microsoft”
yeah sure close enough! :)
Am i the only one who still has no problems with 8GB? Not that I wouldn’t be happy with more but i can’t remember the last time I’ve even thought about ram usage
If your job requires you to use chrome and vscode, 8GB is usually not enough :/
At my last WFH job my daily setup was firefox, sublime text, slack (electron app), github desktop (also electron), and 3 terminals, one running a local dev server. It all ran fine.
I use potato PC with just 8GB of ram to work. I regularly use VSCode and docker. It still run smoothly when I use it properly. lol.
Guessing you don’t run a couple docker containers to support local development;-)
it’s almost like the ram usage depends on the software / services you need to run /s
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