3mo ago

32GB Ram and Linux

155 comments

Meanwhile the electron app you're trying to run
- The other day my laptop was sluggish as hell, checked top and turns out Discord and Orca Slicer were maxing out my cores
  
  Is Orca that resource intensive? I'm running it in a container with KasmVNC and have never really checked out the resource usage. Admittedly it's on one of my local servers in another room. I guess it's how large your projects are too.
  Edit: maybe it's just my small projects
  
  What's the benefit of running Discord's app instead of just using it as a PWA? A PWA would reuse your existing browser and its session.
- you are right :d
- And your browser with 300 open tabs doesn't even fit into the room
  
  Firefox unloads old tabs when restarting the browser, so most of those are more like temporary bookmarks.
  Don't think I've ever seen someone open 300 tabs in one session or on Chromium...

I've seen builds of the Linux kernel that comfortably fits in my on-die CPU caches.
So it would just be a picture of an empty sofa.
- There are mid range CPUs with 128MB of L3 cache now. A Linux distro like Tiny Core could fit entirely in cache.
  
  Tiny Core Linux is a minimal Linux kernel based operating system focusing on providing a base system using BusyBox and FLTK. It was developed by Robert Shingledecker, who was previously the lead developer of Damn Small Linux.
  Ah, that explains a lot! Didn't know about TCL.
- That sounds neat. Link?
  
  Hm? Do you mean a link to builds that are this small? My midrange Intel i5-12600K (I'm a working man, doc...) L3 cache is 20,971,520 bytes. My Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu kernel) vmlinuz right now is only 14,952,840 bytes. Sure, that's a compressed kernel image not uncompressed, but consider this is a generic kernel built to run most desktops applications very comfortably and with wide hardware support. It's not too hard to imagine fitting an uncompressed kernel into the same amount of space. Does that help to show they're roughly on the same order of magnitude?
  Ten years old kernels could be 2 MB.
- My ARM board from 2010 has 256MB of memory. It runs an old 3.1 kernel (not attached to internet) , new kernels won't fit/load. But on that I have OpenMediaVault running SAMBA shares and mindlna to serve music. It isn't even using 50% of the 256MB

Can't relate, just upgraded my laptop from 32GB to 64GB since VScode would keep closing due to OOM. What? Oh, no, it's not vscode's fault.....I keep like 5 Firefox windows with 30+ tabs open, like a fucking maniac..... Close them? What do you mean "close" them?
- Only 30 tabs, you need to bump those numbers up!
  
  I had around 1500 open tabs in Firefox. It was fine. I figured enough was enough and closed them all. Now I close all tabs at the end of the day before shutting down.
  
  I was about to reply to the same thing to another comment about 300 tabs, LOL
- When I started hitting OOMs I just downloaded free ram.
  (Modifying my zram-generator config to use 1.5x my ram size instead of the measly 4GB – uncompressed – default. Seriously it's worth looking into, though default depends on your distro)
  
  Can't you just add swap?
  I think you can run some apps purely on swap and keep your ram for vscode only
- You only need 1 tab to OOM if that tab is Jira. I've literally had tabs take up more than 10GB.
- No need to convince me. I will always believe people complaining about garbage electron apps.
  That being said, I use vscodium myself and actually like it. Does not mean I won't complain tho
- Get sideberry, it allows you to "sleep" unused tabs
  
  It does that by default though?
- I think there's still something wrong with your setup.... You should be able to have as many Firefox windows and tabs as you'd like without using too much RAM, since they should de "suspended".
  I regularly have hundreds of tabs running fine, on 32GB of RAM.
  Most likely it's a vscode extension that's leaking memory, and this problem will still happen after your upgrade, just take longer.
- I mean, I doubt Kate or Geany or Vim would've closed due to OOM, but sure...
- same with intellij

Wondering how my 64gb will outlast every other part upgrade my gaming Linux box will get over the years
- Your use case is obviously different, but I've gone years between system upgrades. I mostly do OSS coding, or work stuff; not gaming. The only case I can imagine needing to upgrade my little Ryzen with 16 cores - a laptop CPU - is if it becomes absolutely imperative that I run AI models on my desktop. Or if Rust really does become pervasive; compiling Rust programs is almost as bad as compiling Haskell, and will take over my computer for minutes at a time.
  When I got this little micro, the first thing I did was upgrade it to 64GB of RAM, because that's the one thing I think you can never have too much of; especially with the modern web and all the shit that brings with it; Electron apps, and so on, absolutely chew up memory. The one good thing about the Rust trend is better memory use, so the crappy compile times are somewhat forgiveable.
  
  Somewhere around 2017 I bought an old dell precision from 2011 for $25, put a radeon rx 570 in it a few years later and used it as my main computer until last year when I finally got around to building a replacement
  
  My case was purely, that I had upgraded the gpu in my classic Mac Pro, and thought that a SFX pc build could be done with the old gpu and a power supply and mobo. It started out with a cheap mobo, to hold only an old i7 from an imac that was parted out, and 8gb of ram (2x4 sticks I had spare) and the vega56. I found it so capable a system, that the only issue was ram when I forgot about the dozen tabs open on a browser, and the game just launched would hang the system. Before I would ‘waste’ spending money on the max 16gb that this board could hold, I started collecting the parts for it’s current setup; a520i, ryzen5 5600x , 64gb, nvme ssd and the gpus I’ve now swapped between the cMP so now it’s a rx5700xt. Use is purely a spare, don’t want a windows machine, I’ve got the mac for a server/media machine, so it’s all purpose and games on the Linux box. Although I have got dual boot capability set up on both just because I could, maybe something really offside would need w10 - one example; VCDS car diagnostic software that doesn’t support anything but win.
- I used to run VM's in parallel for my job, which eat RAM like candy. Other than that though, I've never had a use case for more than 32GB RAM.
  
  700 tabs + VM?
  At work I regularly kiss 32gb with everything open and a VM. When I got my latest machine I made sure to get 64 so I think I'll be good for a while. 32 gigs lasted me from 2017 to 2024. And if I need more this machine takes 2 SODIMMS so I can install at least 96 gigs.
  
  Fixing a SSAO bug where indices overflowed the 32bit int on the gpu I had to use 64GB. Since then I have never needed more than 32GB and at home 24 is way more than I need.
  Well, I just remembered, actually I did need more once for a fftv bug (same story, 32bit overflow) but I borrowed a 192GB pc for that.

Gives a lot of Space for running Virtual machines.
Also browsers can chew that up fast if you have a lot of tabs, Firefox has managed to do it a few times. At least until I started limiting its RAM to 8GB (best decision ever)

(To use it with other apps like Chrome or Electron apps just replace the command at the end, and startup class with the ones from the program you'd like to run. Icon and Name changes are optional but might be desirable so you remember what app it is for).
- Alternatively you can open about:config and limit memory usage there. For example limit in-memory cache.
  EDIT: it seems firefox doesn't allow to set RAM limits yet, only cache sizes
  
  That's good to know, I don't know how well it would work though I feel like I enabled something about closing background tabs to reduce memory load (it might have been what you said, it might have been something else I don't really remember) and it helped a little bit but it still ended up chewing up a lot of memory.
  Setting the limit though did help immediately. And stop the overconsumption problems, occasionally a couple of tabs crash here and there but it doesn't freeze or worse cause other apps to slow down and freeze. Which did happen before.
  
  Something I didn't consider when answering earlier is that even if Firefox did have good RAM usage limiting built-in I probably still wouldn't use it or recommend it, because one of Firefox's biggest problems is that it leaks. And memory leaks will not be negated by Firefox's built-in RAM limiter but they will be by systemd's (or anything else you might be using instead) Firefox would still crash in the event of a leak but it's still better than it taking gnome or other apps with it, or freezing your system entirely.
- Oh my god thanks but what if someone had a systemd free system
  
  It might be harder for them but there are similar tools that they could use to limit it. One I've seen people use is firejail, a tool designed for sandboxing processes and applications.
  I've personally never tried it myself though so I can't attest to how well it works, either for this purpose or sandboxing in general.
- systemd-run? Wtf?
- Hey, thanks for this.
- Does it kill Firefox if it tries to go over the limit? I think I tried this once and if there is a memory leak it just closes itself (which is batter than hogging the whole system, bit still)
  
  No, it just limits the amount of RAM that Firefox (or whatever other application you launch with these parameters) will see.
  A few Firefox tabs may crash occasionally as a side effect. And obviously a Firefox eats up all of the 8GB it's allocated it may crash itself though usually it doesn't and tabs will crash before the browser crashes.
  
  I think Firefox only sees 8 GB and limits itself ideally. So if it goes over it just unloads unused tabs and such.

the rest is electron

Once you fire up a webpage it'll just dump garbage all over the couch.

Java would like to hog the couch
- Minimum requirements to run hello world in Java

you just need more things to run on it

Plenty of room left over for my Chrome tabs
- Four of them.

Microsoft Flight Simulator: A whole airplane on the couch
- well it's in the name
  
  "Microsoft"

I wish I was a cat
- I wish you were a cat too
  
  ...name checks out

i think you might be able to run kde plasma with that!
- Fun fact, KDE is very lightweight. More so than a lot of folks give it credit for
  
  It’s amazing. Until there is a conflict with mismatched qt libraries.
  
  plasma wayland just doesn't work with orca and x11 uses 7× your system resources
- Better add 32 GB Zram to be safe tho
  I use Kde plasma so I'm allowed to make fun of it

Try realizing ten thousand mesh instances in Blender and watch that sucker eat the rest of your RAM like it's got a pebble in its shoe.
I did that on my work PC with 128 GB memory (originally built for esports shit) and it still wasn't enough.
- What fucking e sports game need 100gb of ram...
  
  It was also supposed to be an all-in-one recording/streaming computer for university events, and they had to use the budget for something. It ended up being used as a proxmox host for a while, then it was handed off to me. Now the most resource-intensive thing it runs is a Windows 11 VM that I ~~torture mercilessly~~ use for experiments. It rarely gets to 10% memory utilization.

One of the cushions is your browser, the other half some IDE you use to write an one-liner.

I use a shit load of RAM on Linux. You guys clearly have amateur numbers when it comes to how many applications you have open at once.
- And hitting high memory pressure is really not fun on Linux (on Fedora at least), it simply locks up and slows down to a crawl and does nothing for minutes until the oom killer finally kills the bad program. I've kind of solvd this by installing a better oom killer on my laptop, but my desktop was easy: buy 32GB of additional ram for like 90$: problem solved
  
  I like to have a 50GB+ swap file. Though Fedora is a bit weird with swap files as by default it's stored in RAM (Yes, extra space for RAM is stored in RAM. I... admit I don't understand the detail).
  
  Hmm, it's been a few years since I've run Fedora, but that's an experience also still stuck in my head from that time.
  I always figured, Linux had just gotten better at that, because I switched to a more up-to-date distro afterwards, but in retrospect, it's not like Fedora is terribly out of date, so maybe that is just a weird configuration on Fedora...
- It’s not hard to max out when doing simulations in Blender, but I know I have a niche use case.
- Multiple Firefox windows, at least one JetBrains IDE, and some other apps and I fill 20-30GBs easily. Sometimes on the lower end, sometimes on the higher end.
  
  Multiple Firefox windows? I'm not that civilised, I just have 100+ tabs in the one window.

Like any cat, Linux is actually liquid and can flow over the whole sofa if it so chooses.

Y'all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I've never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it's only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it's doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it's completely unusable. I'm surprised the laptop platters don't escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.
I found that it will... eventually... load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it's going it's actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes...
- If you can afford it, a SSD will significant improve your life. Also, any more memory will help.
  As others said, you can disable swap.
  Are you running the xfce version of Mint? It's significantly less resources.
  
  you can disable swap.
  Be careful with disabling swap if you don't have a very large amount of RAM, as many apps rely on memory overcommitment and a large virtual address space, which can behave erratically without swap.
  You'd be better off keeping swap enabled and instead setting vm.swappiness = 0 in sysctl.conf.
  Swappiness is a value between 0 and 100, where 0 means to never swap unless absolutely necessary (only if you completely run out of RAM), and 100 means all programs and data will be swapped nearly instantly. Think of it like a target for the percentage of RAM to keep available. The default is usually 40 which is fine for a low-RAM system, but swaps way too often for a system with more RAM.
- I use bunsenlabs helium on my old vaio a series laptop. I use a 32 bit non pae build bc it's a pentium M that might not support pae. It uses a window manager over a desktop environment.
  I'd recommend using a 32 bit distro as they tend to take up a little less ram.
  Also I'm on a 4200 rpm PATA HDD. It has 2 gb of ddr ram. It's slightly too old to get ddr2 which is unfortunate.
- More than enough for MX Linux with Xfce. But it's not going to make your applications a whole lot faster.
- can you not disable swap? force it to stick to physical RAM.
  
  You absolutely need swap on a low RAM system. It's the only way the system will actually be usable. You'll hit OOMs (out of memory errors) that take down the whole GUI if you turn off swap on a system with only 2GB RAM. You can only really turn off swap if you have a very large amount of RAM, and even then, it's safer to keep it enabled and set swappiness to 0 instead.
- Arch, with XFCE and the strict bare minimum. Ex : midori instead of firefox, etc. Don't dream about CAD
- Antix will run on old grey boxes with mb of ram, it oughta work for you too.

i mean, some games (cough cough factorio cough cough) manage to use up about 25GB of ram on my system, so it's nice to have a buffer. now, my 64GB may be considered a bit overkill but i call it future proofing
- I upgraded to 64 GB a few months ago, also thinking it would be future proof for a while. However, I entirely exhuasted it two weeks ago 😑
  
  tf are you doing
- My work takes 40 gig and I can still play Factorio while working :)
  
  yeah probably because of all the mods i play with, and the the absolute overkill i manufacturer everything with

Leaves Firefox running.
OOM

Am i the only one who still has no problems with 8GB? Not that I wouldn't be happy with more but i can't remember the last time I've even thought about ram usage
- If your job requires you to use chrome and vscode, 8GB is usually not enough :/
  
  At my last WFH job my daily setup was firefox, sublime text, slack (electron app), github desktop (also electron), and 3 terminals, one running a local dev server. It all ran fine.
  
  I use potato PC with just 8GB of ram to work. I regularly use VSCode and docker. It still run smoothly when I use it properly. lol.
- it's almost like the ram usage depends on the software / services you need to run /s

You are not Linuxing hard enough.

Now run Mixtral

My system gets maxed out of the 16gb regularly.
- Yeah. Firefox will gladly make itself comfy in my 32Gb... It's annoying because just because 80% of RAM is "used" doesn't mean it is really.
  
  this; every time the ublock origin absolutists insist that everyone must use Firefox or die I just wonder if they never open more than one or two tabs anyway. hell, a sufficiently complex web app running in a single tab can make FF choke

That's how I got a free netbook. The netbook had 32GB flash with windows and office occupying 27+GB. Then windows wanted to do an update - with an 8+GB file. Spot the problem. And windows can get quite annoying with updates. As the netbook could not be expanded, and attempts to redirect the update to a USB stick did not work, a newer netbook was bought, and I got the old one. Linux plus libreoffice plus a bunch of extras happily sat in 4GB...

so much space for activities

True story. I remember back in the bad old days when Firefox had notorious memory leaks, so when building my latest PC, I put in 32GB. The monitor app on my desktop has only ever topped out at showing 30% of memory allocated.

Floppinux anyone?
Long time ago I had a 3.5" HD floppy disk Linux with graphical user interface and ethernet and some programs on it. But 64 bit and the increased kernel size probably make this difficult nowadays.

Play star citizen. You'll use that up fast.

I spent years gaming on 8gb. Sure I could barely open bg3 but do I really need my 32 now?

When I think back to when I marveled that one of our office's 8Gb nightly backup tapes fit in my shirt pocket - EIGHT GIGABYTES - in my POCKET!!!...
In the future Gen ┐ will whine to their parents that their cerebral implant is only 100 terabytes.

Do vmtouch -t /
- I love when things are in ram. Can have whole vm disks. I also like creating new VMs in ram disks like /dev/shm it makes less wear on my ssd.

chrome

Ram disks!!

But there's so much room for ACTIVITIES!!!
- And on linux, so much room for cache that doesn't have to be dumped to disk!

install Garuda, not BionicPup

This is on my Framework Laptop:

 undefined

    
free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            58Gi       3,3Gi        47Gi        82Mi       8,6Gi        55Gi

Here is my Proxmox server:

 undefined

    
free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           125Gi        66Gi        33Gi        24Mi        26Gi        58Gi
Swap:          8,0Gi          0B       8,0Gi

My minimal arch installation on my 128 GB RAM monster of a computer
- Came here to say something similar.
  My work issued me a 128gig 64 core monster of a PC, came with front and back carrying handles.
  To run Ubuntu and write some scripts.

undefined

% free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 125Gi 15Gi 90Gi 523Mi 22Gi 110Gi Swap: 63Gi 0B 63Gi
I'll use it eventually. Just gotta let the disk cache warm up.
- 63GiB swap, really...?
  
  I have enough disk space.
  Plus my /tmp is a ramdisk and sometimes I compile large things in there (Firefox) so it is nice to let it be flushed out to disk if there are more important uses for that RAM than holding a file that most likely won't be read again.

Fire up a couple VMs to snuggle with.

Zfs being a Maine-coon

This comment section is a goldmine

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