Tim: >> When faced by the complete bog-down when something like Firefox started >> paging, it struck me that too many applications expect unlimited memory >> access, instead of handling things some other way. It could take a >> prolonged fight to wrest control back once that started to happen. >> Which didn't help by the keyboard and mouse not having enough priority >> against other things.
Barry Scott: > Having zram-paging helps a lot, but is not a solution to not having enough > memory > for the work load you want to run. If you can add memory to your system. One would hope that 16 gigs was more than enough for casual computing. As far as I can remember, it's really only a web browser that would cause paging problems on my computer. It's an overly-complicated program, often running badly coded pages (both in inefficient coding, and incompetently written things, never mind deliberate malfeasance). And you don't need to have 100 tabs open, you just need to strike one thing that's bad. Then whoomph! If you were lucky, and noticed things starting to go sluggish, you could intervene and kill the browser before it fully bogged down. But if you weren't, it might have as well been using floppy discs to page to. You'd be hammering away at the CTRL+Q hotkeys trying to get the quit, but the keyboard's not being paid attention to. Worse, if the browser wasn't already in focus, you had no chance of activating it. And no chance to get the mouse over to it. Then you'd be hammering away at CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to try and kill the X server (which I found a better approach than trying to CTRL+ALT+DEL). All to avoid having to be brutal and pull the power plug out, or using the motherboard reset button, and risk any filesystem corruption that might happen. You could leave a system up for hours, and it'd never recover. Once in a blue moon it might finally catch up with one of your keypresses and quit the browser, but that was a rarity. And you could hear the disc drive still churning away, afterwards. Fortunately I haven't seen this for a long while. That may be due to changes in the web browser making it a bit more robust against this. Or maybe some common scripts various website used that didn't do their own coding got improved upon. > The kernel is configed to over-commit memory. That is to say allow processes > to allocate > more memory then the system has. The memory is only actually allocated by the > kernel with it's > written to or read by the process. In practice this works very well most of > the time. > > You can configure the kernel to no longer over-commit, but expect processes > that run happily > today to start remove failed-to-allocate-memory errors. You probably only need to be able to set some confining rules on one program; the web browser. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
