On 04/03/2020 20:45, Michael Hamilton wrote:
On Thursday 05 March 2020, James Knott wrote:
I'm running 15.1 & KDE. One thing I've noticed is swap use increases through time, even though I'm not even using all the real memory. Eventually, it gets to the point where my system bogs down and can become unusable. At the moment, I'm running 13.6 GiB of 15.6 memory and 4.1 of 24 swap. Why should swap be used at all, when there's still a significant amount of free memory?
No matter how you've set up swap and swappiness, bogging down only happens if a system is actually running out of memory, no amount of setting changes is going to fix running out of memory.
I'll give that a qualified yes and a qualified no. Bogging down due to running out of memory on a virtual memory system and hitting swap intensively is termed 'thrashing'. It is characterised by heavy activity to the swap disk, as opposed to heavy file activity that happens with a file IO intensive application such as some database activities. Please note that there are other file system oriented activities that can bog down a system. A disk-to-disk backup involving a file system tree walker (find feeding cpio, for example or generating the list for rsync). There are also other ways to bog down a system using IO. Backup across a network might be one. Then there are the CPU intensive ways to bog down a system.
Our home desktops run chrome and firefox quite intensively. They have 8 and 16 GB respectively. They never get into a bogged down situation.
Depending on your meaning of 'bogged down'. There are going to be cases where rendering of graphics by the CPU alone will consume all the CPU bandwidth. OK, very fringe and hardware dependent...
I suspect you are running something that is leaking memory or some long run process that refuses to release memory it has accumulated.
Possibly some plug-in for Firefox?
Previously in such situation I would keep an eye on the memory usage. Perhaps in KsysGuard and watch for a gradual increase in usage after starting some program or starting some activity. Or perhaps in htop with processes sorted by memory usage.
The last time I had this sort of issue was when running chrome, the Android IDE, and and some Android emulators all at the same time with only 8 GB of RAM.
I've had it easily running Chromium, and also multiple active overlapping windows in Firefox each running multiple YouTube videos and switching back and forth. The CPU grew warm ... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org