Is Orca that resource intensive? I'm running it in a container with KasmVNC and have never really checked out the resource usage. Admittedly it's on one of my local servers in another room. I guess it's how large your projects are too.

Edit: maybe it's just my small projects

What's the benefit of running Discord's app instead of just using it as a PWA? A PWA would reuse your existing browser and its session.

Firefox unloads old tabs when restarting the browser, so most of those are more like temporary bookmarks.

Don't think I've ever seen someone open 300 tabs in one session or on Chromium...

Tiny Core Linux is a minimal Linux kernel based operating system focusing on providing a base system using BusyBox and FLTK. It was developed by Robert Shingledecker, who was previously the lead developer of Damn Small Linux.

Ah, that explains a lot! Didn't know about TCL.

Hm? Do you mean a link to builds that are this small? My midrange Intel i5-12600K (I'm a working man, doc...) L3 cache is 20,971,520 bytes. My Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu kernel) vmlinuz right now is only 14,952,840 bytes. Sure, that's a compressed kernel image not uncompressed, but consider this is a generic kernel built to run most desktops applications very comfortably and with wide hardware support. It's not too hard to imagine fitting an uncompressed kernel into the same amount of space. Does that help to show they're roughly on the same order of magnitude?

Ten years old kernels could be 2 MB.

My case was purely, that I had upgraded the gpu in my classic Mac Pro, and thought that a SFX pc build could be done with the old gpu and a power supply and mobo. It started out with a cheap mobo, to hold only an old i7 from an imac that was parted out, and 8gb of ram (2x4 sticks I had spare) and the vega56. I found it so capable a system, that the only issue was ram when I forgot about the dozen tabs open on a browser, and the game just launched would hang the system. Before I would ‘waste’ spending money on the max 16gb that this board could hold, I started collecting the parts for it’s current setup; a520i, ryzen5 5600x , 64gb, nvme ssd and the gpus I’ve now swapped between the cMP so now it’s a rx5700xt. Use is purely a spare, don’t want a windows machine, I’ve got the mac for a server/media machine, so it’s all purpose and games on the Linux box. Although I have got dual boot capability set up on both just because I could, maybe something really offside would need w10 - one example; VCDS car diagnostic software that doesn’t support anything but win.

Somewhere around 2017 I bought an old dell precision from 2011 for $25, put a radeon rx 570 in it a few years later and used it as my main computer until last year when I finally got around to building a replacement

700 tabs + VM?

At work I regularly kiss 32gb with everything open and a VM. When I got my latest machine I made sure to get 64 so I think I'll be good for a while. 32 gigs lasted me from 2017 to 2024. And if I need more this machine takes 2 SODIMMS so I can install at least 96 gigs.

Fixing a SSAO bug where indices overflowed the 32bit int on the gpu I had to use 64GB. Since then I have never needed more than 32GB and at home 24 is way more than I need.

Well, I just remembered, actually I did need more once for a fftv bug (same story, 32bit overflow) but I borrowed a 192GB pc for that.

I had around 1500 open tabs in Firefox. It was fine. I figured enough was enough and closed them all. Now I close all tabs at the end of the day before shutting down.

I was about to reply to the same thing to another comment about 300 tabs, LOL

Can't you just add swap?

I think you can run some apps purely on swap and keep your ram for vscode only

It does that by default though?

That's good to know, I don't know how well it would work though I feel like I enabled something about closing background tabs to reduce memory load (it might have been what you said, it might have been something else I don't really remember) and it helped a little bit but it still ended up chewing up a lot of memory.

Setting the limit though did help immediately. And stop the overconsumption problems, occasionally a couple of tabs crash here and there but it doesn't freeze or worse cause other apps to slow down and freeze. Which did happen before.

Something I didn't consider when answering earlier is that even if Firefox did have good RAM usage limiting built-in I probably still wouldn't use it or recommend it, because one of Firefox's biggest problems is that it leaks. And memory leaks will not be negated by Firefox's built-in RAM limiter but they will be by systemd's (or anything else you might be using instead) Firefox would still crash in the event of a leak but it's still better than it taking gnome or other apps with it, or freezing your system entirely.

It might be harder for them but there are similar tools that they could use to limit it. One I've seen people use is firejail, a tool designed for sandboxing processes and applications.

I've personally never tried it myself though so I can't attest to how well it works, either for this purpose or sandboxing in general.

No, it just limits the amount of RAM that Firefox (or whatever other application you launch with these parameters) will see.

A few Firefox tabs may crash occasionally as a side effect. And obviously if Firefox eats up all of the 8GB it's allocated it may crash itself though usually it doesn't and tabs will crash before the browser crashes.

I think Firefox only sees 8 GB and limits itself ideally. So if it goes over it just unloads unused tabs and such.

...name checks out

"Microsoft"

It’s amazing. Until there is a conflict with mismatched qt libraries.

plasma wayland just doesn't work with orca and x11 uses 7× your system resources

It was also supposed to be an all-in-one recording/streaming computer for university events, and they had to use the budget for something. It ended up being used as a proxmox host for a while, then it was handed off to me. Now the most resource-intensive thing it runs is a Windows 11 VM that I torture mercilessly use for experiments. It rarely gets to 10% memory utilization.

I like to have a 50GB+ swap file. Though Fedora is a bit weird with swap files as by default it's stored in RAM (Yes, extra space for RAM is stored in RAM. I... admit I don't understand the detail).

Hmm, it's been a few years since I've run Fedora, but that's an experience also still stuck in my head from that time.

I always figured, Linux had just gotten better at that, because I switched to a more up-to-date distro afterwards, but in retrospect, it's not like Fedora is terribly out of date, so maybe that is just a weird configuration on Fedora...

Multiple Firefox windows? I'm not that civilised, I just have 100+ tabs in the one window.

tf are you doing

yeah probably because of all the mods i play with, and the the absolute overkill i manufacturer everything with

you can disable swap.

Be careful with disabling swap if you don't have a very large amount of RAM, as many apps rely on memory overcommitment and a large virtual address space, which can behave erratically without swap.

You'd be better off keeping swap enabled and instead setting vm.swappiness = 0 in sysctl.conf.

Swappiness is a value between 0 and 100, where 0 means to never swap unless absolutely necessary (only if you completely run out of RAM), and 100 means all programs and data will be swapped nearly instantly. Think of it like a target for the percentage of RAM to keep available. The default is usually 40 which is fine for a low-RAM system, but swaps way too often for a system with more RAM.

You absolutely need swap on a low RAM system. It's the only way the system will actually be usable. You'll hit OOMs (out of memory errors) that take down the whole GUI if you turn off swap on a system with only 2GB RAM. You can only really turn off swap if you have a very large amount of RAM, and even then, it's safer to keep it enabled and set swappiness to 0 instead.

At my last WFH job my daily setup was firefox, sublime text, slack (electron app), github desktop (also electron), and 3 terminals, one running a local dev server. It all ran fine.

I use potato PC with just 8GB of ram to work. I regularly use VSCode and docker. It still run smoothly when I use it properly. lol.

this; every time the ublock origin absolutists insist that everyone must use Firefox or die I just wonder if they never open more than one or two tabs anyway. hell, a sufficiently complex web app running in a single tab can make FF choke

I have enough disk space.

Plus my /tmp is a ramdisk and sometimes I compile large things in there (Firefox) so it is nice to let it be flushed out to disk if there are more important uses for that RAM than holding a file that most likely won't be read again.