firefox rule

Also, modern OSes are designed to fill as much of your RAM as possible. Windows does it, Android does it; pretty sure Linux and MacOS does too. The number you're looking at only shows the RAM usage by currently running processes. Unused RAM is wasted RAM, so your OS will fill as much of it as possible with prefetched data so that your machine will be more responsive when you actually need to use the data that was stored in advance for you.

And their phones do this waaay more aggressively and noone complains.

I only see hunter2, oh wait, that's the wrong meme.

Edit: Y'all beat me to it.

You can, but i XXXXXXX can’t.

See.

Since their profile picture is Komi Shouko from "Komi can't communicate", who is sometimes canonically portrayed with cat ears they are either joking or rejecting their true inner self.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

Me when I take a joke seriously.

I don't hate furries, but some of them have....weird kinks. Not this though. who gives a fuck if someone wears a buttplug? buttplugs are hot af.

Not only that, but the character in that profile pic often sprouts cat ears when she has strong feelings.

None of thaťs helpful. You know, when browser uses half your ram, teams quarter and rest of the programs the rest, windows is swapping on your SSD like a prick and you cannot switch windows - none of what you said helps. And of course, the RAM is soldered on and cannot be expanded.

There’s a difference between “free” memory, and “available” memory.

I agree with this, and I'm sure most people complaining about Firefox or Chrome's abhorrent memory usage would too. The problem with most browsers is that they eat up the available memory and often do not give it back. So you end up with situations where you're running low on available RAM even though you have 32GB installed.

​

Buy the memory, use as much of it as you can, as often as you can. Go wild with it. Enjoy.

Sure, if you release it when not using it, otherwise unlimited RAM privilege revoked. Memory leaks suck and when they chew up all your RAM and they continue to happen, offending apps should either be no longer used, or limited to their minimum necessary RAM requirements to limit the damage they'll do.

Hence why I capped Firefox at 8GB, anything more would be wasted when it inevitably leaks.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Firefox RAM limit 8GB
GenericName=Firefox Ram limit 8GB
Comment=Limit RAM for Firefox to 8GB;
Exec=systemd-run --user --scope -p MemoryLimit=8G firefox
Icon=firefox
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;Development;
StartupWMClass=Firefox

Use all the RAM you want, but if another program needs it give it back ffs!

For me there are programs that "can acceptably use that much RAM" and those that it's "unacceptable", to me. what's 20% to 40% of my gaming rig's resources may be uncomfortably taxing and laggy for my laptop. Its okay to waste resources on my gaming rig but the laptop needs all it can get. I accept some software will not reasonably run on the laptop. My employer has stuck me on 10yo hardware before, running windows 10 pro + intrusive expensive antivirus and nobody is around to question why their computers are getting 5-15fps and locking up for a minute or two when you open chrome. It becomes normal. Any software is the host and/or backbone for other running software should focus on reducing it's own resource usage for the sake of its children.

I work in tech, and I don’t understand people’s obsession with having all their RAM free at all times.

If you don’t use it, why do you have it?

Windows (not the best OS, but the one I know the most about), will lie to you about how much memory you have that’s free. It puts data in RAM as cache. In the event you need that data, it’s already loaded in RAM. Usually this is stuff like DLLs and executables for programs.

There’s a difference between “free” memory, and “available” memory.

Linux and macOS do the same, although I wouldn't call it lying per se :)

There is certainly a lack of understanding of the difference between free and available RAM. TLDR: yes, free RAM is indeed wasted RAM.

If you actually have a lot of free RAM, it's probably because you either booted or freed a lot of RAM very recently. After using your computer for a while, most of your available RAM should not be free but rather being used for page cache and other caches.

After a program has just read and/or written more data from disk than will fit in available RAM, the kernel's page cache (which is typically the bulk of that not-free-but-available memory) should be mostly populated by the most recent of those operations. This means that if that program (or any other program) reads those files again, before they are evicted from cache by other things, they will not need to wait for the disk and will get them back much faster.

However, managing all of this is the kernel's job, and the not-free-but-available RAM being used for page cache is not (in any OS, as far as I know, though I mostly know Linux) attributed to the program(s) responsible for putting things there.

So, when people are complaining about an application using 40% of their RAM it is not necessarily due to them misunderstanding free-vs-available RAM. The used number for an application does not include the portion of the system's not-free-but-available RAM which the application is also responsible for occupying.

(If you want to know which programs and/or which files are responsible for occupying your page cache... on Linux at least, it is not really possible without instrumenting your kernel. The kernel is just tracking blocks. There several tools which will let you see which blocks of a given file are cached, but there isn't a reverse mapping from blocks to files.)

The whole RAM thing is way overblown. Both browsers request a lot of RAM allocation, but only actually use a fraction of it. When the OS needs it for another process this "allocated, but unused" pool is the first to get used when "Free and unallocated" is gone

Problem is windows reports it all as the same in the task manager so people see that "70%" usage and freak out.

Tl:Dr Windows task manager is a fuckin lier.

Most browsers these days have issues with high RAM usage, and memory leaks to. I'd recommend trying to limit the RAM of the browser, it stops it from eating up so much.

Here's how I did it on linux. I'm sure there's a way to do it if you're on Windows though (might not be as good though).

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Firefox RAM limit 8GB
GenericName=Firefox Ram limit 8GB
Comment=Limit RAM for Firefox to 8GB;
Exec=systemd-run --user --scope -p MemoryLimit=8G firefox
Icon=firefox
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;Development;
StartupWMClass=Firefox

This is a script to limit Firefox to 8 gigabytes of RAM, you may change it lower or higher depending on what your needs are by changing the number from 8 to whatever else you'd like. Fair warning though setting it too low will cause Firefox to lag very badly, and will crash chromium browsers outright (Ask me how I found out).

fuck the fucking fuckers.

Source: https://xenia.chimmie.k.vu/ (She has more art, I recommend checking it)

Yeah procreation is sin. Masturbation is not.

I got tired of cleaning them out so I stopped. Now I have an emotional attachment to my 200+ tabs on Firefox mobile 🥹
I have so many the counter turned to infinity lol

Exatcly do it correctly and use multiple browsers each for a very specific type of work/thing you do you animals.

I don't understand this. The only people i have seen with a boatload of tabs open are twitch streamers. I have like maybe 5 open MAX and that's rare.

counterpoint: why does it need to keep the tabs in ram? either just discard the data and only keep the url, or if it would otherwise double check whether you want to close a tab then save things to disk cache after 5 minutes..

wat. lol. javascript has nothing to do with the memory consumption. just humans being shitty at their jobs.

Disagreed, memory Limiting definitely helps with over-consumption. Can't consume all the RAM when you only have access to 8GB of it.

What's his stance on javascript? Banned totally on the web?

But all the ads will come back, so it's a wash

*lynx (links are the things that tie the www together)

Its being wasted if a memory leak causes it to use all 32 gigs of ram and crash

It's only a problem if it doesn't give it up when other apps need it and there's not enough. Browsers just cache a bunch of shit in memory for speed and convenience, but they should unallocate it back to the pool if something else calls for it. The internet complaining about this for years and years are mostly doing so from a place of ignorance.

If an app allocates it and ever uses it and refuses to give it up unless killed that can be considered wasted. It's called a memory leak and they can be really bad, especially when they consume a lot of memory, as that memory might as well be empty but is being held hostage by other apps.

If they released RAM then whatever amount they were using wouldn't be wasted and if more is needed they'd simply release it to free up resources. That hasn't been happening though, and most modern Browsers are notorious for consuming massive quantities without releasing it back to the pool.

In that case with the presence of Memory leaks being considered, and the fact that they continue to not be fixed, the acceptable amount of RAM a browser should be using (should even have access to) is the minimum necessary to run smoothly. From my testing with Firefox that seems to be 8GB. 4GB caused many websites to struggle. Such an arrangement ensures that even if a Browser begins eating RAM it won't eat up all the RAM and cause issues, worst that'll happen is that it itself will crash from eating all the 8GB it was allowed to access.

Empty ram is wasted ram. In theory the system should use whatever is available to cache and streamline.

🥴

Whomst?

I tried that but I found that its effects on long term memory leakage weren't adequate for me, and it still consumed way too much RAM. Which is why I just decided to limit RAM for Firefox. It achieves a similar effect as the browser unloads tabs when it runs low on memory, it just doesn't wait until it's using 31GB of RAM and instead just uses up to 8GB (which is what I capped it at) before unloading tabs.

wait so you just lose tabs you haven't opened in X mins?

i have a tab sleeping extension & generally throttle the ram with opera