I have using IceWM to save RAM memory and now I have some open programs:
Firefox, Thunderbird, Dolphin and a Terminal
My swap has 10 GB I think that’s enough
and I have a 2 GB ram memory chip installed, but it is left only 78 MB
Is this correct or am I having a problem on my PC?
How exactly are you determining that only 78MB is “left”? Caching uses whatever unused RAM is available to speed up activities that are running. 78MB could be merely space the cache hasn’t consumed lately, even if you have exhausted your swap.
Probably you want to see a visual depiction of RAM usage, to know how much is really available if disk cache were cleared. Two simple ones you can run in an Xterm are top and free. Htop is similar to top but is graphical. Various others with more sophistication and graphical modes exist. You may already have a decent one if you have Plasma installed: ‘kcmshell5 memory’ which you can start from run command or a terminal.
If you were having memory problems, that would be more likely to show up as segmentation faults.
If you are low on memory, then you might see more swapping.
I used Plasma on a machine with 2G of memory. But it died about a year ago, so I cannot test that. I do notice, however, that firefox 60.x is using significantly more resources than firefox 52.x used to use. And that might be an issue for you. Only you can tell.
On 07/17/2018 03:16 PM, sergelli wrote:
>
> I have using IceWM to save RAM memory and now I have some open
> programs:
> Firefox, Thunderbird, Dolphin and a Terminal
> My swap has 10 GB I think that’s enough
> and I have a 2 GB ram memory chip installed, but it is left only 78 MB
> Is this correct or am I having a problem on my PC?
>
>
If not already installed install the memtest package. Reboot and select
the memtest option to test your ram. I needed to do this a couple of
weeks back because I was having intermittent problems with my system
locking up. Turned out one of my ram modules developed Alzheimer so I
pulled it and have not had issues since.
–
Ken
linux since 1984
S.u.S.E./openSUSE since 1998
1-openSUSE repos contain memtest86+ v5.01
2-last changelog entry for memtest86+ was March 2015
3-memtest86+ is a 16 bit utility which cannot run on UEFI systems
4-memtest86 continues in development, latest is v7.5
5-memtest86 is a free .iso download that includes the old 16 bit version as well as the current version and automatically runs the version appropriate to the PC when run from stick or OM
The reason for my question, was that all of these programs (firefox, thunderbird, dolphin, terminal on KDE) ran together on this machine, but with OpenSUSE 13.2 and I had no slowdowns or crashes.
Now that I’ve installed Leap 15, this is impossible.
And even using iceWM instead KDE only yields about 70 mg of free memory.
So I have problems if I try to run anything else.
Now I found one of the great memory thieves. Turning Firefox off the free memory jumps from 70 to 532 Mg
If I turn off the rest of the programs, I get 662 Mg of free memory
This means that for the system just being waiting consumes more than 1000 Mg of memory.
Wow … I feel like going back to openSUSE 13.2
As one famous person said: "But I’m not the only one"
I’m running KDE Plasma. I have two browsers open. They have both been open since I last rebooted (Monday morning). One of those browsers if “firefox” and the other is “opera”. And “firefox” is using far more memory than “opera”, even though I open many more web pages with “opera” than with “firefox”.
The current “firefox” is a memory hog.
Maybe try “chromium” or “vivaldi” or “opera” or even “falkon” instead of “firefox”.
First,
I created a Wiki article re-stating how to the the Free tool (which is also embedded in tools like top) for memory and cache analysis
https://en.opensuse.org/User:Tsu2/free_tool
But, before you read that article you should understand the changes how memory is utilized and managed by OS (including Linux) today compared to years ago…
In the old days, there was an attitude like what you describe that applications should only use a minimal amount of RAM and “unused memory” was a valuable metric.
Then, there was a revelation… Applications work better when physical RAM is utilized as much as possible, there is little benefit to reserving unused physical resources, making applications work harder for what they are doing. The result is that today no matter if you run a single application or many, if there is plenty of activity it’s likely that your physical RAM utilization will keep increasing over time until it’s nearly all “used.”
But, that shouldn’t necessarily cause your system to slow down… The system should evaluate your activity and automatically move whatever hasn’t been used recently or often to your disk cache (swap) so that your applications can perform best.
That said, algorithms are not perfect and if you decide to all of a sudden do something that the algorithms does not expect, then it will take time to re-allocate and free up RAM for the new, unexpected use. If you run into this situation, the I’ve provided you a command at the end of my “Free” article that can manually clear your memory in these rare instances.
The other thing to be aware of is that Firefox has been identified as a source for memory leaks in the past, but generally due to plugins and not so often the Firefox application itself. Keep Firefox free of unnecessary plugins and be careful about the plugins that are installed. And, keep in mind that the more tabs and windows you open in Firefox will increase its memory requirements.
HTH,
TSU
Firefox, Thunderbird, Dolphin and a Terminal in 2GB RAM should be perfectly reasonable, but the reality is the mozillas are big memory consumers. Switching Firefox to 52.9 ESR (from the optional Mozilla repo) if you are using v60 might be worth trying to see if it makes a difference, but it’s ostensibly on its last iteration of support now.
SeaMonkey combines the web engine of Firefox (actually the web engine Firefox uses grew out of SeaMonkey’s predecessor, the Mozilla Suite) with the mail engine of TB (same situation, TB grew out of the suite). The result is using SM instead of FF + TB consumes less RAM due to shared components. Current SeaMonkey is using the same RV as Firefox ESR 52.9.
If you can get the RAM up to 4GB it would be well worth it. Doing so shouldn’t be terribly expensive for an older machine with DDR2 or the initial type of DDR3, both of which are readily available used.
How old is your TB profile? Do you compact TB folders regularly, or ever?
Is baloo running in the background even in IceWM?
You might wish to try substituting Midnight Commander for Dolphin. I only ever use OFMs, of which MC is one (from standard repos), and it uses very little RAM. Another good OFM that I’ve been using around 25 years is File Commander, from silk.apana.org.au.
On 07/18/2018 04:56 PM, nrickert wrote:
> The current “firefox” is a memory hog.
>
> Maybe try “chromium” or “vivaldi” or “opera” or even “falkon” instead of
> “firefox”.
I have run vivaldi against opera and find it unusable with more than a
couple of tabs are in use. It’s a memory hog just like firefox.
–
Ken
unux since 1984
S.u.S.E./openSUSE since 1998
On 07/19/2018 09:25 AM, Ken Schneider wrote:
> On 07/18/2018 04:56 PM, nrickert wrote:
>> The current “firefox” is a memory hog.
>>
>> Maybe try “chromium” or “vivaldi” or “opera” or even “falkon” instead of
>> “firefox”.
>
> I have run vivaldi against opera and find it unusable with more than a
> couple of tabs are in use. It’s a memory hog just like firefox.
>
vivaldi uses too much memory.
–
Ken
unux since 1984
S.u.S.E./openSUSE since 1998
Fair enough.
I use “firefox” for normal browsing and “opera” for the browser to use with “akregator”. Previously, I used “vivaldi” rather than “opera”. But I’m finding that “opera” is pretty good.
Back with Leap 42.3, I used to have two “firefox” open (with different profiles). One of them was mostly sitting idle. But I’ve stopped doing that, because the memory load of “firefox” is too high.
I haven’t used for a long time, but IceWeasel used to be a popular “alt” web browser.
Would take some getting used to,
But you could use a non-graphical text web browser fro simple tasks…
They generally wouldn’t be practical for common web-surfing.
A short list of choices…
https://alternativeto.net/software/lynx/
In general though,
I don’t know if you can expect a common graphical experience with only 2GB of RAM and expect to run a number of apps simultaneously.
I set up almost all my LXqt, LXDE and XFCE virtual machines with only 2GB of RAM, but they’re “single purpose” machines for the most part… They aren’t used for every day everything and typically don’t run more than maybe 5 apps at a time (and I consider each browser tab and window as a separate application, and I consider any app with a database backend as 2 2 apps).
The machines I run IceWM are usually “text server” type machines, again primarily for single purpose, not multi-use and the graphical enviornment is only there when it’s more convenient to do something than in the console environment.
I’d estimate that using IceWM instead of LXDE, LXQt or XFCE might allow you to run applications using 768-1G more RAM, but you’ll still be limited in what you can do without better hardware.
HTH,
TSU