4 ms·

Definitely outliers. The Steam hardware survey [0] is obviously not a perfect measurement, but in its February results only ~3% had 64GB and only ~0.3% had more

Definitely outliers. The Steam hardware survey [0] is obviously not a perfect measurement, but in its February results only ~3% had 64GB and only ~0.3% had more than that. I recently upgraded to 64GB to run quantized LLM models, but when I'm not using an LLM I rarely use more than 16GB, much less 32GB. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

IshKebab 3y ago
I have 32GB on my Linux laptop (plus 12GB swap) and regularly run out of RAM with just a handful of VSCode's open (it's generally the language servers using all the RAM) and a couple of dozen Firefox tabs (Firefox seems to be much worse than Chrome RAM-wise). If I run my actual work project, which needs a few gigs then it often just completely runs out of memory and hard reboots. Never have the same problem on Windows even though I only have 16GB there. Feels like Linux is just really bad at memory management. That may be skewing the Steam survey since almost everyone there will be using Windows. On Linux I wish I had 64GB.
- spookie 3y ago
  Have you tried zram for instance? There are a lot of things one can do to better utilise RAM on Linux. I believe Fedora comes ootb with a lot of things to make ram management quite good. Using another distro these days, but Fedora impressed me on that front. (edit: Try to use zram and zswap, check if your i/o scheduler is correct for your hardware, and increase your swapiness value. These should make your system behave better. For other performance improvements, use ananicy and irqbalance.)
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Yes I have zram enabled. First thing I tried. Even if it is possible to fix this, it's still a horrible bug because you absolutely should not have to blindly tweak settings to stop a desktop computer from hard-rebooting when it runs out of RAM. I think this is a really fundamental problem on Linux though - it would require enormous changes and unprecedented cooperation between different groups for a proper fix. Much easier to say "you're holding it wrong".
    - denysvitali 3y ago
      Sounds like you need some swap (?)
- snovv_crash 3y ago
  Set your swap to double your RAM. Windows has a swap file that grows as much as it needs to.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Windows lets you set the swap size limit. The biggest difference is that Windows doesn't over-commit, so you need a big swap file otherwise you'll be running out of memory all the time even before you actually use all your physical RAM.
- lolinder 3y ago
  You might just be misunderstanding Linux's RAM management strategy. Do you actually start getting out of memory errors, or do you see "free" memory rapidly go to zero? If it's the latter, that's because Linux deliberately uses as much RAM as possible for caches and such, which means "free" should be near zero most of the time. The number that actually matters on Linux is "available" memory, which is the amount of memory that is currently free or used for optional caches and could be reallocated for a new required chunk of RAM should an application need it. Here [0] is a decent in-depth explanation. If it's the former, there's something very wrong with your installation, because every Linux system I have makes much better usage of memory than Windows, even running a heavyweight DE like KDE. Even my machine that dual-boots Linux and Windows performs noticeably better on all metrics (including memory usage) when in Linux. [0] https://linuxblog.io/free-vs-available-memory-in-linux/ https://linuxblog.io/free-vs-available-memory-in-linux/

IshKebab 3y ago

I have 32GB on my Linux laptop (plus 12GB swap) and regularly run out of RAM with just a handful of VSCode's open (it's generally the language servers using all the RAM) and a couple of dozen Firefox tabs (Firefox seems to be much worse than Chrome RAM-wise). If I run my actual work project, which needs a few gigs then it often just completely runs out of memory and hard reboots. Never have the same problem on Windows even though I only have 16GB there. Feels like Linux is just really bad at memory management. That may be skewing the Steam survey since almost everyone there will be using Windows. On Linux I wish I had 64GB.

spookie 3y ago
Have you tried zram for instance? There are a lot of things one can do to better utilise RAM on Linux. I believe Fedora comes ootb with a lot of things to make ram management quite good. Using another distro these days, but Fedora impressed me on that front. (edit: Try to use zram and zswap, check if your i/o scheduler is correct for your hardware, and increase your swapiness value. These should make your system behave better. For other performance improvements, use ananicy and irqbalance.)
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Yes I have zram enabled. First thing I tried. Even if it is possible to fix this, it's still a horrible bug because you absolutely should not have to blindly tweak settings to stop a desktop computer from hard-rebooting when it runs out of RAM. I think this is a really fundamental problem on Linux though - it would require enormous changes and unprecedented cooperation between different groups for a proper fix. Much easier to say "you're holding it wrong".
  - denysvitali 3y ago
    Sounds like you need some swap (?)
snovv_crash 3y ago
Set your swap to double your RAM. Windows has a swap file that grows as much as it needs to.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Windows lets you set the swap size limit. The biggest difference is that Windows doesn't over-commit, so you need a big swap file otherwise you'll be running out of memory all the time even before you actually use all your physical RAM.
lolinder 3y ago
You might just be misunderstanding Linux's RAM management strategy. Do you actually start getting out of memory errors, or do you see "free" memory rapidly go to zero? If it's the latter, that's because Linux deliberately uses as much RAM as possible for caches and such, which means "free" should be near zero most of the time. The number that actually matters on Linux is "available" memory, which is the amount of memory that is currently free or used for optional caches and could be reallocated for a new required chunk of RAM should an application need it. Here [0] is a decent in-depth explanation. If it's the former, there's something very wrong with your installation, because every Linux system I have makes much better usage of memory than Windows, even running a heavyweight DE like KDE. Even my machine that dual-boots Linux and Windows performs noticeably better on all metrics (including memory usage) when in Linux. [0] https://linuxblog.io/free-vs-available-memory-in-linux/ https://linuxblog.io/free-vs-available-memory-in-linux/