[Discuss] Hoggish software was: Linux Kernel Building

[Shirley Márquez Dúlcey]

Oh, you already kind of mentioned that.

But the thing is that most users of browsers don't WANT them to go idle.
They might have notifications that can be received, or an email program
running that can receive new messages, or any number of other things that
happen regularly. But the memory cost of doing that in Chromium is high, in
part because it normally uses as much memory as it can grab to speed up its
own operation -- for example, keeping fully rendered versions of pages so
that you can instantly switch to their tabs. If the browser really IS the
user's primary application, as it is for some, that's good. If you're
trying to use your computer for other things as well and have a limited
amount of RAM, not so much.

Fortunately, RAM is cheap right now. Unless you own an unexpandable system
(M1 or M2 Mac, laptop with soldered memory) or you're running an older
system and have already hit its memory ceiling, in which case you can't
just go out and buy more.

On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 3:43 PM Shirley Márquez Dúlcey <mark at buttery.org>
wrote:

> The catch is that browsers never really go idle. They always have stuff
> going on in the background. So they're never going to completely swap out.
>
> On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 3:29 PM Dale R. Worley <worley at alum.mit.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> > From: Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org>
>> >
>> > Well, guess what: Once I quit Chromium, my 8GB machine has *plenty* of
>> > RAM for kernel compiles. On a "-j8" make 46% of my RAM gets to be cache
>> > and buffers. If I want still more, I could quit Thunderbird.
>> > (Thunderbird doesn't seem to be designed for efficiently handling tens
>> > of thousands of messages in my inbox, huh.) Or I could quit Signal. (A
>> > "modern" program, therefore it needs a half GB of RAM to just sit
>> there,
>> > doing nothing.)
>>
>> This is probably my age showing, but:
>>
>> My assumption is that if a program is running but idle, and you run
>> something else heavy-duty, the aforesaid program should get swapped out
>> and stay out of the way of e.g. your kernel build.
>>
>> Back when my first laptop had 16MB of RAM and Slackware, the disk would
>> spin down if it wasn't used.  I noticed that once an hour it would spin
>> up for a minute.  I never tracked down the program that was writing to
>> the disk once an hour.
>>
>> So the issue you are having seems to be that Chromium etc. still
>> execute, and hit a lot of RAM pages, even when they're not doing
>> anything for you.  Are there good strategies for avoiding this sort of
>> thing?
>>
>> Dale
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>