phryk✅  

2020 – The year of "4GB of RAM aren't enough to run a fucking browser anymore" on the desktop.

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resist1984  

@pettter @phryk i concur, & I'm disgusted that the web has gotten too fat for 4gb. Avoid . This issue brought me to learn that browsers have a task manager (in the menu) which shows the memory footprint per tab.

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ITwrx  
@resist1984 where is this task manager in FF? i'm not seeing it. TIA
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phryk✅  

@ITwrx
Don't know about that either –
@resist1984, are you talking about the Memory tab in the developer tools?

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resist1984  

@phryk @ITwrx I click on the "burger" icon (w/the 3 bars), and there is a "more >" which expands to a "task manager". That's in browser (FF-based) but iirc it's roughly the same for FF and Chromium

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ITwrx  
@resist1984 @phryk thanks! i thought i had looked everywhere before asking. boo to me! :)
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resist1984  

@ITwrx @phryk it's a shame the task manager is not in "Tools" menu. It's becoming more important lately, and they've hid it well.

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ITwrx  
@resist1984 @phryk my pleroma is over 200MB right now. In the voice of Homer Simpson when his belly fell off the towel rack when weighing himself, "Oh my!"
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resist1984  

@ITwrx @phryk I've had some websites bring down my whole system lately. Not sure if RAM bloat alone can be blamed but projects like need to take off & save us from the shitty web.

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ITwrx  
@resist1984 @phryk when something like that is going on i like to open up a terminal and run htop. then sort by ram and cpu to see what's going on. A runaway script will run the CPU up. ps_mem will show ram use by program, instead of process, which is nice.
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resist1984  

@ITwrx @phryk no chance of that in my case. If I nudge the mouse when it gets in this state, the pointer will move in an hour or so /if I'm lucky/. I always have a terminal running but can't even alt-tab to it in this state. Usually I can't even ctrl-alt-F2 to switch to a pure terminal. Hard drive is going ape-shit in this state, likely swapping. I even run "ionice" on all browser sessions.

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resist1984
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@phryk @ITwrx ionice makes no difference. It's so overtasked I can't even SSH in remotely. I would like to know what in advance can be done to just have a log of what the HDD is doing when it's pegged like that.

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resist1984  

@ITwrx @phryk sometimes I let it run its course by leaving it on overnight, and it's often (but not always) functional by morning. Would be nice if the system could detect when the HDD is pegged, and take some action like "pkill firefox & pkill chromium"

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resist1984  

@phryk @ITwrx perhaps I should run firefox this way: "systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=1G firefox"

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ITwrx  
@resist1984 @phryk you probably have to only use one browser at a time with only 4GB of ram. i just had to order 8GB more b/c "only 8GB" wasn't cutting it. Mine started bogging down anytime i tried to use 2 browsers at the same time with just a few tabs. i'm not impressed either.
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ITwrx  
@resist1984 @phryk #Firefox locked up my computer yesterday, due to ram usage. I think it's not releasing ram from tabs once they are closed, or takes it's sweet time doing it. I would rather it not hold on to ram for any tab except the one i have in focus. I'm getting pretty tired of all browsers. We really need a browser that focuses on security, privacy and performance. It can't be funded with means that conflict with those basic goals of the project.
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