this has been an issue with linux desktop for the past several years. it use to be that you could run linux on a quarter gig of ram with no risk of issue for most average tasks.
the problem is the browsers. firefox or chrome, take your pick, have all but given up on trying to keep resources under control. i use firefox regularly and it can eat up 4 gigs or so with almost no effort.
to be fair, i do think that the problem isn't really firefox's codebase, its the extensions or websites that firefox is running, i have had a firefox extension that if it was active, all memory would eventually be consumed and the system would lock up. and websites don't concern themselves with making sure your system has enough resources to run 250 other tabs at the same time. i know firefox can be tuned to reduce the amount of pages that are cached in memory and such, but i think there needs to be better and more restrictive default settings and more confinement of the extensions
with that said, i would expect linux to not let the system lock up so hard as it does. if a browser is consuming 7.5 out of 8 gigs and hasn't touched 7 of those GB for a long time, those pages should have been slowly trickled to swap. or at least just the browser would have its memory swapped out all at once and only the browser would slow to a crawl. the rest of the system should stay usable.
the problem is the browsers. firefox or chrome, take your pick, have all but given up on trying to keep resources under control. i use firefox regularly and it can eat up 4 gigs or so with almost no effort.
to be fair, i do think that the problem isn't really firefox's codebase, its the extensions or websites that firefox is running, i have had a firefox extension that if it was active, all memory would eventually be consumed and the system would lock up. and websites don't concern themselves with making sure your system has enough resources to run 250 other tabs at the same time. i know firefox can be tuned to reduce the amount of pages that are cached in memory and such, but i think there needs to be better and more restrictive default settings and more confinement of the extensions
with that said, i would expect linux to not let the system lock up so hard as it does. if a browser is consuming 7.5 out of 8 gigs and hasn't touched 7 of those GB for a long time, those pages should have been slowly trickled to swap. or at least just the browser would have its memory swapped out all at once and only the browser would slow to a crawl. the rest of the system should stay usable.
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