Do
vmtouch -t /Plenty of room left over for my Chrome tabs
Four of them.
I’ve seen builds of the Linux kernel that comfortably fits in my on-die CPU caches.
So it would just be a picture of an empty sofa.
That sounds neat. Link?
Hm? Do you mean a link to builds that are this small? My midrange Intel i5-12600K (I’m a working man, doc…) L3 cache is 20,971,520 bytes. My Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu kernel)
vmlinuzright now is only 14,952,840 bytes. Sure, that’s a compressed kernel image not uncompressed, but consider this is a generic kernel built to run most desktops applications very comfortably and with wide hardware support. It’s not too hard to imagine fitting an uncompressed kernel into the same amount of space. Does that help to show they’re roughly on the same order of magnitude?Ten years old kernels could be 2 MB.
Gotcha - I thought you meant you had seen some sort of demo/article/whatever with a proof of concept, but I misunderstood.
My ARM board from 2010 has 256MB of memory. It runs an old 3.1 kernel (not attached to internet) , new kernels won’t fit/load. But on that I have OpenMediaVault running SAMBA shares and mindlna to serve music. It isn’t even using 50% of the 256MB
There are mid range CPUs with 128MB of L3 cache now. A Linux distro like Tiny Core could fit entirely in cache.
Tiny Core Linux is a minimal Linux kernel based operating system focusing on providing a base system using BusyBox and FLTK. It was developed by Robert Shingledecker, who was previously the lead developer of Damn Small Linux.
Ah, that explains a lot! Didn’t know about TCL.
Won’t run on my 386? Well what good is it then.
so much space for activities
I use a shit load of RAM on Linux. You guys clearly have amateur numbers when it comes to how many applications you have open at once.
Multiple Firefox windows, at least one JetBrains IDE, and some other apps and I fill 20-30GBs easily. Sometimes on the lower end, sometimes on the higher end.
And hitting high memory pressure is really not fun on Linux (on Fedora at least), it simply locks up and slows down to a crawl and does nothing for minutes until the oom killer finally kills the bad program. I’ve kind of solvd this by installing a better oom killer on my laptop, but my desktop was easy: buy 32GB of additional ram for like 90$: problem solved
Hmm, it’s been a few years since I’ve run Fedora, but that’s an experience also still stuck in my head from that time.
I always figured, Linux had just gotten better at that, because I switched to a more up-to-date distro afterwards, but in retrospect, it’s not like Fedora is terribly out of date, so maybe that is just a weird configuration on Fedora…
I like to have a 50GB+ swap file. Though Fedora is a bit weird with swap files as by default it’s stored in RAM (Yes, extra space for RAM is stored in RAM. I… admit I don’t understand the detail).
It’s not hard to max out when doing simulations in Blender, but I know I have a niche use case.
Zfs being a Maine-coon
Like any cat, Linux is actually liquid and can flow over the whole sofa if it so chooses.
Java would like to hog the couch
Minimum requirements to run
hello worldin Java
Leaves Firefox running.
OOM
Meanwhile the electron app you’re trying to run
you are right :d
And your browser with 300 open tabs doesn’t even fit into the room
Firefox unloads old tabs when restarting the browser, so most of those are more like temporary bookmarks.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen someone open 300 tabs in one session or on Chromium…
Consider also getting Simple Tab Groups. You can basically instantly send a bunch of tabs to a “group”, which is like bookmarks except they can also be opened/closed all at once in a new window. Very handy, you can open 50 tabs researching something, close them all, then instantly reopen them when coming back to the research.
Firefox is my tab-hoarding enabler 😍
i think i have over 200 tabs open in Zen (firefox fork)
The other day my laptop was sluggish as hell, checked top and turns out Discord and Orca Slicer were maxing out my cores
What’s the benefit of running Discord’s app instead of just using it as a PWA? A PWA would reuse your existing browser and its session.
Global keyboard shortcuts are pretty nice. E.g. muting yourself without alt tabbing to your browser.
Oh that’s a good point. I totally forgot that Discord has voice features. don’t use Discord often, and when I do, it’s just for text chat. Unfortunately some open source apps I use use Discord for communicating with the developers.
Is Orca that resource intensive? I’m running it in a container with KasmVNC and have never really checked out the resource usage. Admittedly it’s on one of my local servers in another room. I guess it’s how large your projects are too.
Edit: maybe it’s just my small projects
Well, when I leave it open for a while it tends to have issues
Microsoft Flight Simulator: A whole airplane on the couch
well it’s in the name
“Microsoft”
Y’all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I’ve never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it’s only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it’s doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it’s completely unusable. I’m surprised the laptop platters don’t escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.
I found that it will… eventually… load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it’s going it’s actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes…
I use bunsenlabs helium on my old vaio a series laptop. I use a 32 bit non pae build bc it’s a pentium M that might not support pae. It uses a window manager over a desktop environment.
I’d recommend using a 32 bit distro as they tend to take up a little less ram.
Also I’m on a 4200 rpm PATA HDD. It has 2 gb of ddr ram. It’s slightly too old to get ddr2 which is unfortunate.
If you can afford it, a SSD will significant improve your life. Also, any more memory will help.
As others said, you can disable swap.
Are you running the xfce version of Mint? It’s significantly less resources.
you can disable swap.
Be careful with disabling swap if you don’t have a very large amount of RAM, as many apps rely on memory overcommitment and a large virtual address space, which can behave erratically without swap.
You’d be better off keeping swap enabled and instead setting
vm.swappiness = 0in sysctl.conf.Swappiness is a value between 0 and 100, where 0 means to never swap unless absolutely necessary (only if you completely run out of RAM), and 100 means all programs and data will be swapped nearly instantly. Think of it like a target for the percentage of RAM to keep available. The default is usually 40 which is fine for a low-RAM system, but swaps way too often for a system with more RAM.
can you not disable swap? force it to stick to physical RAM.
You absolutely need swap on a low RAM system. It’s the only way the system will actually be usable. You’ll hit OOMs (out of memory errors) that take down the whole GUI if you turn off swap on a system with only 2GB RAM. You can only really turn off swap if you have a very large amount of RAM, and even then, it’s safer to keep it enabled and set swappiness to 0 instead.
most of these old systems dont have soldered RAM a few extra gig of DDR2 RAM would be dirt cheap on ebay too
If you can find it :) DDR2 is old enough that a lot of it has been thrown out as e-waste. If you’re lucky, you may be able to find some at a computer/electronics recycler for free.
install Garuda, not BionicPup
Look at all that room to get stuff done.
When I think back to when I marveled that one of our office’s 8Gb nightly backup tapes fit in my shirt pocket - EIGHT GIGABYTES - in my POCKET!!!…
In the future Gen ┐ will whine to their parents that their cerebral implant is only 100 terabytes.
