On Fri, 6 Nov 2020 07:48:40 -0700 Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss wrote: > Memory usage is getting frustrating for me, as whether I use 64gb of > ram, or 128gb, I still tend to exhaust memory on my system. My > laptop currently has 64gb, and started freaking out this morning, to > find I was hitting oom's again with browsing and some general use as > wake up. Ouch. I have no problem using 16GB RAM > > Trying to figure out with htop what is using all my memory, firefox > was a big consumer, using ~25gb of ram once killed. Yeah, it's like > that. Chrome was typically worse. I use 6 profiles, as I have to for > different companies I consult for, mostly due to different gsuite > accounts and different o365 accounts that will not play nice in a > same profile. Same for Chrome. I figure I can't be the only person > that does this, perhaps so, but the memory utilization with with only > a few tabs on each is astounding. Chrome/Chromium and Firefox are absolute pigs. I finally tamed Firefox ty setting it to drop all cache and other stuff upon exit, and then I shut down all instances of Firefox every day. > > I tend to run several VM's at a time, a full instance of windoze10 or > two with 4-8gb of ram work fine. I don't know how many VMs you run, but those eat up memory. > > I use pluma text editor a lot as the gedit fork from mint, which I'll > find uses 3-4gb of memory with a few dozen text files open. Of text. > Doesn't seem to be worth a few gig of ram. What the heck kind of editor requires 3-4GB RAM? That sounds crazy to me. Why do you have a few dozen files open simultaneously? > > Libreoffice itself tends to use 3-4gb of memory keeping a dozen or two > files open, which again flipping between several customers, I tend to > work on, review, etc constantly. Libreoffice is kind of a pig. Is there something else you can use? And why a dozen or two simultaneous files open? This sounds like a workflow nightmare. Do you mean one Libreoffice instance with 24 files open, or a bunch of separate Libreoffices in VMs. If the latter, yeah, that's going to burn a lot of RAM, even more than one instance with 24 documents. > > Even on boot, kde tends to use ~3.5gb of memory, and after running > for a few week or two, with everything else killed, will start > consuming ~9gb with nothing else running. No idea where it goes. Ohhhh, KDE. I call that Krash, Delay, Expand. See http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm . I use OpenBox, which is a low-RAM, just-the-facts window manager. On every machine I ever used KDE, performance was bad and on lower RAM machines, things ground to a halt. Gnome and KDE are luxuries for folks with lightning fast processors and huge quantities of RAM, who want their computers to perform like a 2015 computer with 4GB RAM. > > My question is how the heck do others run linux with only 4-8gb of > ram on a "normal" system? Most linux users are likely IT > professionals like myself, just curious what the heck I'm doing wrong. I'm running a 2014 computer: * AMD A6-6400K APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (dual core) - 3.1Ghz dualcore * 16GB RAM * Openbox with dmenu and UMENU2 With no browsers open, this machine is is snappy as hell. With firefox set to dump cache upon exit, as long as I do reasonable housekeeping on tabs, and prophylactically close all firefox instances at least once a day, everything's pretty good. That being said, this is a 2014 machine, so I'm soon buying a 3.6 Ghz 6 core (65 watt) with 64GB RAM. This will give me more latitude in running Chromium, which I need for Jitsi, and allow me less stringent housekeeping in Firefox. SteveT Steve Litt Autumn 2020 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss