This comment section is a goldmine
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…
you just need more things to run on 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
My work takes 40 gig and I can still play Factorio while working :)
Ram disks!!
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
it’s almost like the ram usage depends on the software / services you need to run /s
If your job requires you to use chrome and vscode, 8GB is usually not enough :/
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.
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.
My system gets maxed out of the 16gb regularly.
Yeah. Firefox will gladly make itself comfy in my 32Gb… It’s annoying because just because 80% of RAM is “used” doesn’t mean it is really.
this; every time the ublock origin absolutists insist that everyone must use Firefox or die I just wonder if they never open more than one or two tabs anyway. hell, a sufficiently complex web app running in a single tab can make FF choke
tell me you have no idea how firefox and ram reserving work without saying you have no idea how firefox and ram reserving work
jokes aside, if the system needs the ram reserved by firefox, the system will get it. it is just faster to rserve ram that is expected to maybe be needed
You got it wrong actually. Firefox is not really actively using all the ram. It’s more like reserving it. The system does that too. When the actual used RAM gets low, Firefox releases some of this unused RAM.
the rest is electron
Setup a VM bot net, RAM problem solved.
True story. I remember back in the bad old days when Firefox had notorious memory leaks, so when building my latest PC, I put in 32GB. The monitor app on my desktop has only ever topped out at showing 30% of memory allocated.
Do
vmtouch -t /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
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 wish I was a cat
I wish you were a cat too
…name checks out
One of the cushions is your browser, the other half some IDE you use to write an one-liner.
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
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.
systemd-run? Wtf?
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
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 a 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.
