On 7/6/20 6:49 PM, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
Unless you're actively using all of those tabs (I don't know how you would be,
but it's certainly possible), swap sounds like the perfect solution. Unless
Firefox keeps JS running in there, and it's updating the DOM, these would
likely be able to get swapped out.
Firefox will actually unload tabs that you haven't done anything with in a
while under specific circumstances, but I don't know what those are. You may
notice, for example, that the page "reloads" without network traffic, when
going to a tab you haven't had open in a while. I've seen this on my system
recently.
Take a look at the Task Manager. You will see tabs running even though
you're not touching that: the pages have elements (ads, animations, etc)
that run even though the tabs are not visible. True, the browser tries
to pacify them (turns off sound/video, and whatnot) but they still
run---and if the JS engine has memory leaks their memory footprint
increases. You can see the culprits---sort them by "Energy Impact" or
"Memory" by clicking on the column headers.
More swap doesn't necessarily solve this problem: remember that 1GB/min
is a ballpark HD speed so if you have 10GB swap that your system is
actually trying to use, you will just sit there for 10 minutes.
I don't really understand how that'd be the case. For that to happen, you'd
have to load all of those into memory, have them swap out, then try to swap
them all back in at the same time.
That's my point---you don't have control over it. Swap algorithm decides
which pages are evicted from RAM or brought back---if the browser starts
allocating memory, my FreeCAD might get pushed out, and if I click on
GIMP window after not using it for an hour it tries to bring it back in.
One way to think about it is that disk is tens of thousands times slower
than RAM. If you need to use it, your system is commensurably slower.
That's why zram is such a good idea. Swap was always a tradeoff: you
saved $'s not spent on RAM, and paid with your time sitting idle waiting
for the computer.
With the modern way of computing, where your data is mostly NOT on your
system---so you don't lose it if your application shuts down---I am
beginning to think that application crashes aren't such a big deal as
they used to be. I'd rather crash and restart where I left off than have
the computer drag me along trying to save my application.
Having said that, of course lots of applications ARE local and will lose
data if crashed, so maybe the cgroup-based approach is the definitive
solution: hard-limit the memory for cloud apps, to protect the local
apps from resource exhaustion.
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