this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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Gives a lot of Space for running Virtual machines.
Also browsers can chew that up fast if you have a lot of tabs, Firefox has managed to do it a few times. At least until I started limiting its RAM to 8GB (best decision ever)
Limit Firefox to 8GB of RAM .desktop file
(To use it with other apps like Chrome or Electron apps just replace the command at the end, and startup class with the ones from the program you'd like to run. Icon and Name changes are optional but might be desirable so you remember what app it is for).
Alternatively you can open
about:configand limit memory usage there. For example limit in-memory cache.EDIT: it seems firefox doesn't allow to set RAM limits yet, only cache sizes
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.
Oh my god thanks but what if someone had a systemd free system
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.
Oh, I was talking about runit,sysvinit and openrc systems
systemd-run? Wtf?
Hey, thanks for this.
Does it kill Firefox if it tries to go over the limit? I think I tried this once and if there is a memory leak it just closes itself (which is batter than hogging the whole system, bit still)
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.
Thanks I understand now, I'll have to try it again
I think Firefox only sees 8 GB and limits itself ideally. So if it goes over it just unloads unused tabs and such.
I can confirm this, the first time I tried it out I accidentally set it to 1 GB, Firefox could only see that amount of memory. Though limiting Firefox to only 1GB its a very bad idea and it can cause it to crash it's not because it's trying to go over though it's just because it ran out of memory.
8GB is what I would consider the safe minimum for web browsing. If you said it lower you'll have performance losses. Setting it higher though will only chew up valuable System RAM by inactive tabs.