One of the things I have seen is with browsers they have a flexible memory footprint. As such they will look at availability of free ram and kind of bloat to fit in order to cache more and provide a "better" browsing experience.

There are some under the hood settings that may allow you to restrict this behavior. Mozilla I found trats each individual profile as its own instance so it swells super fast. Chrome seems to keep multiple profile awareness better and considers all profiles together. Eve though it takes more it usually gives it back more readily. 

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020, 7:49 AM Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

-mb


---------------------------------------------------
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