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ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 week agoThat behavior with Linux is absolutely real, and it’s very weird that it hasn’t been fixed in over a decade. It’s due to the default OOM (out of memory) killer being way too conservative with killing an application when the memory is completely full and disk swapping. Some people have solved this with an app that watches for OOM situations and acts with more decisiveness to kill an offending application before it swaps and brings the system to a halt, called EarlyOOM.
That still isn’t quite as good as Windows handling though, as Windows can generally handle those situations without killing the application at all.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 week ago
TIL!
Awkwardly, I find that the largest memory pressure tends to come from a particular web page that continually gobbles up more memory the longer it is open.
There’s always one of these somewhere, and I’m bad at closing tabs. I usually notice pretty quickly when I come back to my computer. As soon as we start hitting page filing, since everything is stuttering and slow, but if it goes overnight, it can literally be 15 to 20 minutes before the system is responsive again after I kill the offending process.
Whereas on my work device, which is Windows, I usually might not even notice until I’ve maxed out my page file, which can be 64 or 128 GB depending on the device. And even then, I only notice because file operations start getting slow because the SSD is being thrashed. Killing the offending process results in responsiveness usually within a few seconds and a full clear out of the page file in a couple minutes.
The explanations that I’ve gotten from another commenter make a lot of sense. That Windows has just always had to deal with high memory pressures, so has been forced to mature in that sense. It is rather odd that Linux is behind on this, though, given its overwhelming representation in headless environments