• icecreamtaco@lemmy.world
    101·
    19 days ago

    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

    • suction@lemmy.world
      21·
      18 days ago

      it’s almost like the ram usage depends on the software / services you need to run /s

      • s4if@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        18 days ago

        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.

      • icecreamtaco@lemmy.world
        5·
        19 days ago

        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.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
    12·
    20 days ago

    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…

    • vin@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      1·
      19 days ago

      More than enough for MX Linux with Xfce. But it’s not going to make your applications a whole lot faster.

      • dan@upvote.au
        1·
        19 days ago

        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.

    • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
      7·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • dan@upvote.au
        4·
        19 days ago

        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.

    • notthebees@reddthat.com
      2·
      20 days ago

      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.

  • SaltyIceteaMaker@lemmy.ml
    12·
    18 days ago

    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

  • JGrffn@lemmy.world
    40·
    20 days ago

    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?

    • lelgenio@lemmy.ml
      1·
      19 days ago

      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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      1·
      19 days ago

      I mean, I doubt Kate or Geany or Vim would’ve closed due to OOM, but sure…

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
      1·
      19 days ago

      Firefox puts inactive tabs to sleep, effectively turning them into bookmarks that reload when you switch back to them. I regularly right-click close-tabs-to-the-right over 200 tabs.

    • expr@programming.dev
      7·
      19 days ago

      You only need 1 tab to OOM if that tab is Jira. I’ve literally had tabs take up more than 10GB.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        19 days ago

        I was about to reply to the same thing to another comment about 300 tabs, LOL

      • dan@upvote.au
        8·
        19 days ago

        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.

          • boonhet@lemm.ee
            3·
            19 days ago

            Wait, do people shut down their computers when they’re done using them?

            I know I did on the desktop PC we had at home when I was a kid… But now the desktop doubles as a homeserver (and does that more than it does gaming lately) and the laptop just goes to sleep rather than shutting it down.

            • dan@upvote.au
              2·
              19 days ago

              I have a separate home server, so I don’t have a reason to not shut down my desktop PC. No reason for it to be using electricity while it’s doing nothing.

              I shut down my laptop because suspend/sleep support on Linux still isn’t great.

    • miss phant@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      8·
      20 days ago

      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)

      • Grian@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 days ago

        Can’t you just add swap?

        I think you can run some apps purely on swap and keep your ram for vscode only

        • miss phant@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          4 days ago

          zram is swap on ram, it works by compressing parts of the ram when you run low and it’s much faster than traditional disk-based swap.

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
      3·
      19 days ago

      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

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    10·
    18 days ago

    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…