Comment # 7 on bug 1094430 from Tony Mechelynck

I'll add at the bottom of this comment the output of a little bash script I
wrote some years ago, showing how disk, swap and RAM memory is used. Of course,
memory use (as opposed to installed memory) is volatile and will vary with
time.

I run yast (or anything else, except zypper dup about once a year) concurrently
with SeaMonkey, whose memory use slowly but surely goes upwards with time:
GNOME System Monitor reports memory use as 20% right after boot before
SeaMonkey is started, 40% immediately after loading it, and up to 80% or more
until SeaMonkey itself becomes noticeably sluggish and has to be restarted, so
"out of memory" is definitely a possibility. I didn't expect setting the boot
default kernel to be a really memory extensive operation, and I didn't take any
special precautions to protect YaST from any memory-hungry processes.

(I have more than 600 tabs open in SeaMonkey, but most of them aren't loaded
since I have set browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to zero in
about:config, which means that on restart, tabs will not load until or unless I
access them.)

Yesterday I ran
    zypper --releasever 15.0 ref
    zypper --releasever 15.0 dup
at runlevel 3 (i.e. without X11) then immediately after reboot (by mistake I
rebooted into kernel 4.12.14-lp150.12.4-debug instead of the corresponding
default kernel) and after starting X11 I used the YaST GUI to set the new
kernel 4.12.14-lp150.12.4-default as the new boot default, without running
again into this problem (which, in the light of comment #6, is understandable
since there were gobs of memory available at that point in time).


Mon 28 May 13:06:36 CEST 2018

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
sysfs              0     0     0    - /sys
proc               0     0     0    - /proc
devtmpfs        3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
securityfs         0     0     0    - /sys/kernel/security
tmpfs           3.9G  184K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm
devpts             0     0     0    - /dev/pts
tmpfs           3.9G  1.6M  3.9G   1% /run
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/unified
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd
pstore             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/pstore
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/pids
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/rdma
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls,net_prio
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/devices
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/memory
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer
cgroup             0     0     0    - /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio
/dev/sda7        92G   76G   16G  84% /
systemd-1          0     0     0    - /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
hugetlbfs          0     0     0    - /dev/hugepages
mqueue             0     0     0    - /dev/mqueue
debugfs            0     0     0    - /sys/kernel/debug
/dev/sda5        20G  8.2G   11G  45% /boot
/dev/sdb2       3.7G   96M  3.4G   3% /mnt/sdb1
tmpfs           785M   24K  785M   1% /run/user/0
gvfsd-fuse         0     0     0    - /run/user/0/gvfs
fusectl            0     0     0    - /sys/fs/fuse/connections
tracefs            0     0     0    - /sys/kernel/debug/tracing

NAME      TYPE      SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file       12G   0B    7
/dev/sdb1 partition 3.7G   0B    5
/dev/sda6 partition  16G   0B   10

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.7G        3.5G        286M        191M        3.8G        3.6G
Swap:           31G          0B         31G