Browser Memory Madness

Michael Butash michael at butash.net
Sun May 24 18:18:59 MST 2020


Interesting thing today, I noticed my computer going a bit crazy, and
looked at a background htop, found my system running at 58gb of ram usage,
which means, it's about to start OOM'ing.  I just upgraded from 32 to 64gb,
on my laptop, and this is the first uptime since I put in the new ram.

Trying to determine who's using all that from htop is hard, outside of
killing stuff, so I have some scripts I've used for years to kill all the
memory hogs individually.  Here's where I started.

[image: image.png]

I had Chromium open, limited, I moved to firefox, so only a few tabs.
Killing that gave me back like less than a gig back.  Good, because it's
the reason I moved to firefox.

[image: image.png]

Next I killed firefox.  It freed up some 35gb of ram.

[image: image.png]

Restarting Firefox with all 4 profiles, total of 8 windows, and 59 tabs, it
comes back up at 28-29gb of ram.

[image: image.png]

There's a Windoze 10vm still open with 8gb of memory (visio, project), a
ton of libreoffice docs, zoom, slack, teams, and text editors for the rest
of that 23gb of space in use.  This is pretty normal for me.

I sort of laugh when I hear systems using "only* 8gb or 16gb of ram, but
still makes me wonder why linux is such a memory hog and how windoze/mac
seem to make this work.

I hear so often "my computer is slow" or "I have to reboot all the time",
makes me wonder just if some pervasive resource perversion by the browser
vendors.  How do other systems *not* use this sort of memory consumption?
Seems when I open the floodgate with more ram, it just uses more.

-mb
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20200524/11715bf9/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 25534 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20200524/11715bf9/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 21622 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20200524/11715bf9/attachment-0001.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 25655 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20200524/11715bf9/attachment-0002.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 16472 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20200524/11715bf9/attachment-0003.png>


More information about the PLUG-discuss mailing list