Re: [opensuse] Get an SSD just for swap?
On 26/11/17 10:34 PM, Mikhail Ramendik wrote:
On 27 November 2017 at 01:48, Anton Aylward
wrote:
In those circumstances I'd go for more memory first. late model Linux doesn't have a hard boundary between buffer space and program space any more, so it figures out where best to use the memory according to circumstances.
Well, the issue is that DDR3 SDRAM is still pretty expensive.
Trust me: It is a good deal cheaper than DDR2 (which is cheaper than DDR which is cheaper than PC-100 that is in my under-desk HP appliance firewall running IPCop).
And then I will have to get rid of it in a year or three when I finally have to upgrade the CPU, as newer CPUs all use DDR4.
So? Then grit your teeth and save the money for that day. (What is it with this younger generation that won't face austerity in the now for a better life in the future: see various articles in New Yorker, The Atlantic and Walrus bemoaning this.) I mean, heck, it's not as if you're like Grandma, saving for a rainy day that never comes. You have a definite plan in mind, a definite objective. And DDR4 memory is going to be cheaper than DDR3 (which is .... etc etc)
You describe the causes correctly, Web content in Firefox or Chrome eats RAM quickly, and if I add some other heavy app the swap-fest starts. According to top, all of RAM and just a couple gigabytes of swap are used, so, yes, an extra 8Gb would resolve the issue, but I am reluctant to spend this money.
What I'm doing is working on aggressively reducing the number of tabs in Firefox and organizing my bookmarks. I realise this doesn't help with some of the enormous spreadsheets, perhaps I can find a strategy there. Documents can be "chapter-ized", so to speak. Mind maps, Freeplane, well for a start there's the Java interrupter. But the developer says he's working on a library that makes better use of multi-core capability. I don't know if that will be more or less memory hungry. Ultimately, I suppose, it is the interpreter from Oracle that is the limiting feature and they tend to be a memory hungry bunch of <deleted>.
I don't know how to track this kind of problem for bug reporting.
Seeing as it happens in both Firefox and Chrome for me, I am not sure it can even be accepted as a valid bug.
When it gets to hang the machine to a point where the mouse doesn't respond, where you can't even hot-key into a TTY, then I think it is a bit more than memory consumption and a high load factor. I have a very large swap area, thank you LVM, and have gone off for a coffee break and read the news on my phone and come back and the machine is still hung. It if was just memory and swap it would, eventually, wind down. That level of incapacity gets back to the kernel. Faster swap won't help in that situation. all faster swap does is compress time, and as I've seen, time is not a fix. I suspect that memory won't be a fix for whatever it is that is stretching the kernel to its capacity in this situation; all more memory does is push that limit out further, needing 1,000 tabs instead of just 450. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
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Anton Aylward