Latest Slab Cgroup Memory Controller Patches Saving ~1GB RAM Per Host On Facebook Servers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Latest Slab Cgroup Memory Controller Patches Saving ~1GB RAM Per Host On Facebook Servers

The past number of months Facebook engineering has been working on a new slab memory controiller for Linux that can offer less memory fragmentation and lower memory use and slab utilization. The sixth version of these patches were published earlier this month...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Slab-Controller-Improvements-V6

[yoshi314]

i wonder how much ram those hosts have, because it might make a difference.

savings on 512GB machine are more or less negligible. on 16GB - significant. slab utilization might also be dependent on that.

i am guessing those are some huge servers.

[pininety]

s/controiller/controller

[skeevy420]

I don't see why this is even necessary.

[mikus]

Using linux every day for the past 15 years or so as a desktop, it is a memory pig these days, so here's to any help we can get, even if it is Fakebook.

My laptop has 64gb of ram, and at times this is still a problem exhausting memory. My desktop has 128, and often that floats over 64gb usage, with several more vm's running.

I keep a win10 image for visio/project around with 8gb ram, but otherwise mostly just use firefox, libreoffice, slack, signal, few other random things, but cumulatively, the least usage I tend to see is roughly 10gb usage with things freshly opened on a restart of the desktop. I've tried kde, cinnamon, all tend to just use an absolute crapton of memory in the past years. Having 64gb of ram (in my laptop) is the least I can work with here.

Firefox is probably the worst offender (I've caught it using as much as 48gb of memory lately), and linux seems to amplify the memory usage terribly. I don't even know how folks use a pc with less than 16gb of ram with linux these days. Curious thing is how windoze machines are still typically around 8gb, and people find this acceptable, so what is linux doing wrong?

[rlkrlk]

mikus how are you measuring memory usage? Different ways of doing that will yield very different results.

[Pentarctagon]

Firefox is probably the worst offender (I've caught it using as much as 48gb of memory lately)

Sitting here writing this, Firefox is using under 1 GB of RAM. So either you've uncovered an immense memory leak, or your usage is highly atypical.

[boxie]

Using linux every day for the past 15 years or so as a desktop, it is a memory pig these days, so here's to any help we can get, even if it is Fakebook.

My laptop has 64gb of ram, and at times this is still a problem exhausting memory. My desktop has 128, and often that floats over 64gb usage, with several more vm's running.

I keep a win10 image for visio/project around with 8gb ram, but otherwise mostly just use firefox, libreoffice, slack, signal, few other random things, but cumulatively, the least usage I tend to see is roughly 10gb usage with things freshly opened on a restart of the desktop. I've tried kde, cinnamon, all tend to just use an absolute crapton of memory in the past years. Having 64gb of ram (in my laptop) is the least I can work with here.

Firefox is probably the worst offender (I've caught it using as much as 48gb of memory lately), and linux seems to amplify the memory usage terribly. I don't even know how folks use a pc with less than 16gb of ram with linux these days. Curious thing is how windoze machines are still typically around 8gb, and people find this acceptable, so what is linux doing wrong?

Not sure what your level of knowledge here is so playing it safe.

ATM I have about 19GiB of my 32GiB used as cache and just under ~6GiB being used (resident) by apps/DE/etc
The cache is free'd as soon as an app needs it (so it's a good use of idle RAM and speeds things up) but means the "Free" space looks tiny, the available RAM is much higher than what your "Free" ram might suggest

[naoliv]

Firefox is probably the worst offender (I've caught it using as much as 48gb of memory lately)

Maybe you are seeing the virtual memory size instead the resident one?
My Firefox right now is using 32.7G of virtual memory but only 346M of resident, for example.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Phoronix: Latest Slab Cgroup Memory Controller Patches Saving ~1GB RAM Per Host On Facebook Servers

The past number of months Facebook engineering has been working on a new slab memory controiller for Linux that can offer less memory fragmentation and lower memory use and slab utilization. The sixth version of these patches were published earlier this month...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...mprovements-V6