Comment by burfog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burfog | Hacker News Reader

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Yes indeed.

My computer at work has 16 GB. It gets slow. Every now and then, I'll open a web page that pushes things past a limit. The browser becomes completely unresponsive and sometimes I can't even move my mouse. While I'm suffering from running out of memory, the browser decides to use up even more memory to pop up a dialog to taunt me about it.

This can even happen without user action, for example when a page automatically loads a new ad. The ads on reddit seem particularly bad in this way. Randomly, one will eat all my RAM.

I often end up having to hold down the power button for 5 seconds. That, and pulling the power cord, are the only reasonable recovery. If I get "lucky", as I did a few days ago, Linux will kill the X11 server; this violently shuts down the whole GUI.

I really really hate the situation. I blame most of it on Chromium and Firefox, both of which don't make a serious attempt to keep things under control. A bit of blame goes to the fact that resources allocated in the X11 server can not be easily mapped back to web pages and thus kept within page-specific memory quotas.

> I often end up having to hold down the power button for 5 seconds.

If you enable the magic SysRq key, Alt+Print Screen+F will trigger the OOM killer.

Quick enable for those who want it:

  kernel.sysrq = 1

in /etc/sysctl.d/90-sysrq.conf.

> I blame most of it on Chromium and Firefox

I rarely have this problem with modern Firefox, but also block ads so maybe that makes the difference. Chrome is always bad, though.

Not all heroes wear capes.

This would, in some way, let me regain control. Most likely it will have killed the X11 server and dumped me to a text console login prompt. If not that, maybe a browser will be killed.

The end result is roughly as bad as just rebooting, so I might as well just reboot.

It typically kills the browser. Sure, it gets you the same result as rebooting if you only have a browser open, but it’s much faster =)

I don't think X11 has anything to do with this. You should set ulimit for the browsers.

The browser loads images into the X11 server. Those images consume memory in the X11 server process. That bloats the X11 server up to be many gigabytes.

There is no reasonable way to account for the memory.

As a tab-hoarding Firefox user on machines running X11 with 2-4GiB of RAM who has spent time investigating Firefox and Chrome memory usage issues, I am having a really hard time believing your claim. Right now on the machine I am typing on there are 38 tabs open in Firefox 58.0, uptime 15 days, Xorg is taking up only 66088 KiB (66 MB) resident memory total.

The "reasonable way" to account for memory is to read the top(1) manual page to find out about the different memory usage statistics, then run top to find out which processes are using how much memory.

I use top. I run top, and it shows that the X11 server is gigabytes in size. Now what? Nothing tells me which X11 client windows are at fault. I can't tell if the memory is even legitimately in use; it could be a leak.

Your 66 MB is really low. Maybe your video driver is better than mine.

Why don't you stop opening so many tabs. People complain about memory usage by chrome and other browsers but at the same time they are the ones that are using tabs as bookmarks instead of actually using bookmarks. 100tabs open out which 50 they will probably never go back to.

I don’t use my tabs as bookmarks. I use them as tabs, to switch between and to have open, to group into windows. It works very well.

Why haven't you switched to wayland yet?

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