I just doubled it on my Linux desktop machine from 16 to 32 gigs, and my performance issues have vanished. A great investment. Of course, it would also help if I didn’t have half a gajillion browser tabs open at once, but it’s nice that there was a technical solution.
9 thoughts on “Memory”
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Good news, but frankly I’m surprised that it helped. Linux IMHO should be more efficient than that.
I think the problem is mostly Chrome. Its memory allocation algorithm seems to be “1) Check for amount of total system memory. 2) Use it all.”
I’m going to start weaning myself off it in favor of Brave and/or Vivaldi, but it’s the only way I can currently run Tweetdeck.
Chrome actually maintains every tab fully in memory independently, so, yes, it is a memory hog when you have a number of them open. Especially on some sites such as National Review, which loads ads constantly. Then the CPU can be overwhelmed, and the system can crash. My Acer Chromebook came with 16 Gb of memory, and all of it is devoted to running Chrome (the OS kernal is Linux).
Yes, Chrome is a huge memory hog. It also sucks up a complete core on my laptop when displaying Facebook.
Core? Did I read core?
Just how old are you?
I purchased the world’s cheapest Windows 10 computer having 4 Gig memory, 500 Gig hard disk, DVD-R/W optical drive. It is a refurbished Acer desktop.
It has a Celeron N3050 1.6 GHz processor. Did I tell you it is slow? I benchmark it as halfway between my 1.2 GHz PIII “Coppermine” dinosaur (which cannot run anything beyond XP because it was one of those Intel motherboards that Jerry Pournelle recommended last century and cannot go beyond 512M) and a high-end “Core 2” computer from 8 years ago.
The unit I purchased was “refurbished”, but I don’t think this thing was ever “furbished” to begin with — it looked brand new. My guess is at the original retail price these puppies didn’t sell so they are selling these “remaindered” units as “used.” Their loss — my gain.
Of course I cannot leave well enough alone and I am thinking of putting a 4G memory stick in it to upgrade to 8G, which they tell me is all this processor will support. So you are saying that adding memory can make a difference?
Someone else suggested that it really doesn’t matter what processor you have, what you really need is an SSD. Acer is seriously “segmenting” their market against cheapskate techies who want to upgrade the thing, and it appears I need to sacrifice either the optical drive or the hard disk given the lack of expansion capability of this thing.
But you suppose an SSD upgrade is another route to accelerating Rand’s system?
For most things that most people do, the CPU really doesn’t matter much. Mine spends most of the time clocked down to 500MHz, because it’s waiting for me to do something.
An SSD will help a lot, particularly for reducing boot times, but it won’t help much if you don’t have enough RAM. Swapping to an SSD is faster than swapping to an HDD, but it’s still a lot slower than reading RAM.
I already have an SSD for the OS. Nothing I can do to speed it up at this point except to upgrade mobo and processor.
There’s several Chrome extensions which “suspend” tabs that haven’t been used in a while, freeing up memory. There is usually an easy way to resume a tab (which basically just reloads it), either by simply clicking on the tab or the window once the tab is brought to the foreground.
I use The Great Suspender and with over 300 tabs currently “open”, my system is currently using 5.87 GB. (What I really should do is convert a lot of tabs into bookmarks or Evernote pages, but this is a really useful stopgap.)