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8GB of volatile memory will be a swapfest every time a "modern" browser opens. Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.
by thefz 3y ago
8GB of volatile memory will be a swapfest every time a "modern" browser opens.
Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.
- deadmutex 3y agoIsn't that what the base M1 Air ships with?
- patrec 3y agoApple's computers appear to have working memory management, whilst Linux doesn't. Anecdotally, an old 8GiB intel mac feels fine, an enormously more powerful 16 GiB linux laptop with Gnome is basically unusable (but runs great once you seriously bump up the RAM).
- viraptor 3y agoAs a dev of multiple languages, distro maintainer, general experimenter-with-things and basic ML user - Linux with 8GB works perfectly fine here. Sounds like something else is happening with your system.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoLinux doesn't deal well with OOM situations but those don't really apply here. 10 tabs in FF brings me to 3.5 gigs total system use, which is plenty of buffer to avoid swapping and OOM freezes.
- walteweiss 3y agoSo I have an old PC with i5 (Gen. 1, circa 2010 or 2011), and 4x 2 GB of ram. One 2 GB module broke and I hadn’t bothered to replace it for years, living with 6 GB. It runs Fedora Workstation 38, with Gnome. It runs it very well, and I came from more than a decade of MacBooks with 16 GB of ram. It runs it so well I don’t notice it’s just 6 GB in there.
- patrec 3y agoI don't doubt you, but maybe your usage was never much memory constrained on either macOS or linux? What sort of software are you running? For what it's worth, I've got an even lower spec machine (4GiB), which works fine for light browsing and similar. But the minimum I need to run smoothly and simultaneously for a work machine is a browser (with plenty of tabs) and some mix of editors and IDEs. Linux craps for me with amounts of RAM that are way beyond what on a mac would still work fine. I don't think there's one single cause for that (e.g. safari is less of a resource hog than what's available on linux, zfs, which I happen to use, is better than apfs but probably also a bit more memory hungry, apple has virtual memory compression by default etc.). Purely out of curiosity, what do ps -A -osize,cmd | awk '/[g]nome/{t+=$1}END{print t/1024^2 "GiB"}' and awk '$1 == "Pss:" {t+=$2}END{print t*1024^-2 "GiB"}' $(ps -A -opid,cmd | awk '/[g]nome/{print "/proc/" $1 "/smaps"}') print on your machine?
- qingcharles 3y agoYou absolutely have to install a form of ad blocking. So many web sites now have multiple hundreds of MBs in payload when you visit. I agree that 8GB is the bare minimum. It's sad :(
- _Algernon_ 3y agoWith 17 tabs open I managed to just about reach 4 gigs in use. This is the entire system, not just the browser. In fact, if I open Witcher 3 in the background with 10 tabs open I just barely get to 8.5 gigs in use. I don't think your experience is generalizable.
- seized 3y agoEh, I have an 8GB Chromebook and I start to notice issues at around 100 open tabs, with the Linux VM running, Obsidian, and VS Code. So you're a bit off.
- _ea1k 3y agoI haven't had that issue with Chromebooks in general. Memory management seems to be decent.
- nolist_policy 3y agoYep ChromeOS runs with MGLRU by default, long before it was merged upstream.
- hot_gril 3y agoBrowser RAM usage is bad but exaggerated. You won't reach 8GB doing this. Maybe like 4.