Linux Memory (again)

[Michael Butash]

I tend to keep tabs on memory a few ways, I use a memory monitor that shows
me used in kde menu tray, and always run htop.  I flushed everything and
rebooted a few days ago sending this, but it was green entirely to around
58gb of mem before I started forcibly having to kill things.  Killing
everything else I could only get it back to 8-9gb of use, which is still
pretty damn steep, so not sure where the memory is leaking to.

Plasma, KWin, and even SDDM tend to use more memory then they should as
well, certainly growing in footprint over time after a reboot to weeks
later in use.

I've tracked some of the news around the oomkiller features being added in
systemd, probably needs to be a todo item.  If the system just killed
firefox or whatever the offender was, it'd be fine, but typically my
desktop will just get wonky as I try to figure out what is up, but often
will end up freezing before I can at that point.  Really annoying, as I
tend to lose some unsaved work every time.

Agreed, perhaps just the way I work I *do* need the memory, but I figure
there's got to be some others that do what I do, working on a more standard
system with 8-16gb ram OK, like probably the other 99% of everyone.

-mb


On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 7:09 PM Ryan Petris via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

> I think maybe you're looking at this the wrong way -- what use is having a
> lot of ram if it's not going to be used? This is how the kernel and some
> userspace programs think about it.
>
> When you look at memory usage, how much is actually in use vs cache? Cache
> is the yellow part of the bar in Htop. If there's just a bunch of cache
> used, this is normal as the kernel isn't really going to drop cache unless
> there's a reason to, and it will do so automatically when more memory is
> needed by anything; thus, you shouldn't really look at cache memory as "in
> use".
>
> As for Chrome and possibly Firefox, they use a lot of RAM, yes, however
> they also somehow tell the OOM killer to kill their processes first in the
> even of an OOM condition. Here's a description of how this is handled in
> ChromiumOS however I imagine it's the same in regular Linux:
> https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/out-of-memory-handling
>
> Therefore, unless random programs start getting killed left and right, I
> personally wouldn't worry about it.
>
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2020, at 7:48 AM, 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.
>
> 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
>
>
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