

COMPUTER RAM PRESSURE PDF
I do my primary development on a 2GB RAM Linux VM, running WindowMaker (16 desktops) and various small apps (lots of terminals, a calculator now and then, PDF reader, word processor, etc). There are all kinds of ways to reduce memory usage. Solution, add more memory or do less in memory. That's why it gets orders of magnitude slower, and the disk starts going crazy. "Dude! There's a bug in the kernel that means it goes to shit when it runs out of memory!" "OMG, are you an idiot? Just connect your phone to the Wifi, run ConnectBot, connect to your laptop's IP address - YOU DO REMEMBER THE IP ADDRESS RIGHT? - and type "killall 'Web Content' killall 'firefox'", duh!") (And either way, it's a horrible solution.
COMPUTER RAM PRESSURE PC
You'll gain "control" of your PC quicker doing that and restarting the applications that matter and recovering your sessions than you would have done trying to kill processes in a remote ssh session. More often than not the only real solution is to hold down the power button. Ssh is slightly more reliable and likely to work than CTRL-ALT-F3, but it's still unusable. If I can launch an ssh session, which sometimes succeeds, more often than not it takes a long time to get a bash prompt, and typing 'top' or something similar will take minutes to process. sshd is a user space daemon, and on top of that Wifi seems to go haywire when the kernel is in "Argh! There's no memory!" mode. I believe something must be done about that to avoid this stall."Ī second solution is to SSH into the machine from another machine and the same speed and technical reasoning applies here as wellĪlmost always impossible. I think that's not how the system should behave in this situation. This little crisis may continue for minutes or even longer. You will not be able to run new applications or close currently running ones. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely sure why). You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer.

If booting a system with just 4GB of RAM available, disabling SWAP to accelerate the impact/behavior, and launching a web browser and opening new web pages / tabs can in a matter of minutes bring the system down to its knees.Īrtem elaborated on the kernel mailing list, "Once you hit a situation when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available, the system will stall hard. From a report: Developer Artem S Tashkinov took to the kernel mailing list over the weekend to express his frustration with the kernel's inability to handle low memory pressure in a graceful manner. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week. It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive.
