[Info-vax] Running Alpha VMS under the ES40 emulator

[Simon Clubley]

On 2013-10-12, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> On 2013-10-11 16:58, George Cornelius wrote:
>>
>> I'm finding that what it takes to almost completely freeze
>> up my 512 MB / 32 bit Linux system is to leave Mozilla up
>> overnight with multiple tabs open.  It pagefaults for what
>> seems to be a full 15 minutes at that point, and may still
>> be nearly unusable when it all unfreezes [OK, using an
>> external Seagate USB3 drive on a USB2 port for paging -
>> spinning at an unspecified RPM - but you get the picture].
>
> Probably because you have nightly stuff run by cron which runs over the 
> disk. That causes a lot of memory to be used for disk caching, pushing 
> all applications out to swap. Which in turn cause a lot of page 
> thrashing when you try to do anything, as programs have to fight the OS 
> to get a few pages back. There is a big tendency for memory to be used 
> as disk cache nowadays...
>

No, the real problem is that Firefox has become a bloated monstrosity. :-)
Running top or ps -axl while using Firefox can be very revealing.

I've got a freshly launched firefox instance running right now with 7 tabs
open and no other page history other than the initial Google home page.
top is reporting that it's currently comsuming 477Mbytes of virtual
memory, which is a insane amount of memory for a newly launched browser.

The tabs are normal HTML pages, such as Slashdot and the Register, with
Javascript disabled and no plugins (Flash isn't even installed for this
Firefox installation).

BTW, I find 512MB to be perfectly fine for a desktop Linux machine.
One of my systems is a old netbook with that amount of memory (it's highly
convenient when you want to drop it in a backpack) and it does everything
just fine. This is Scientific Linux 5.x with a Gnome 2 desktop.

The only problem I have with it is when Firefox has been running for a
period of time and I experience the same memory thrashing problems
described above but nowhere near as bad. Other GUI applications all work
just fine with it, BTW.

You shouldn't need 1-2Gbytes to run a web browsing desktop. Unfortunately,
there isn't any other browser around with Firefox's range of plugins.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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