Just wondering if people reboot their desktop/workstation machines periodically because of (for example) memory leakage issues.

Notably caused by browser usage.

My machine has currently been up for 28 days, for example.

@FaheemMitha I shut it down every day because of power issues...

That is: When it's shut down, it doesn't consume any power!

:D ;-) :D

@FaheemMitha I seem to reboot one of my macOS machines every couple of months or so. It's under heavy load and when the kernel has accumulated more than 5-6 GB or memory, it's time to reboot. My macOS laptop reboots twice a year or whenever there's a system upgrade.

I reboot my OpenBSD machine several times a day. I install the latest base system snapshot (i.e. a system upgrade) whenever it's available, so that's one or two times a day or so, but sometimes just once a week. It also depends on how much I need it for work (it's the machine I do my actual work on).

Hmmm have ypu have glag a post by mistake while hand the mobile site version?

@RuiFRibeiro I often hva glag posts by mistake on the mobile site version!

In other words: huh?

@Videonauth ??!!

Have you tried to turn it off and on again?

I bet fabby will understand my humor :)

@Videonauth Probably a reference to the IT Crowd. But what's the context?

well i just woke up and just read power issues and made some weird brain stuff with it pulling out the context and had then this 2019 survey screenshot in mind stating Mc Guyvers Handbook for Computer problems

its not neccesarily related to your discussion

:)

likei said fabby might get a chucckle out of it as he knows me IRL too

@Videonauth I didn't get any of that. But never mind.

dont worry bout it

@Kusalananda I'm not sure what you mean by "when the kernel has accumulated more than 5-6 GB or memory", but I would like to know. And I'm mentally substituting "of" in place of "or".

@Videonauth I won't.

@Fabby Fair point, but that's a bit orthogonal to my concerns.

Does anyone know any easy way to check if there is significant memory leakage. My machine has 16GB. It shouldn't really be swapping. And it does that even if I have only one browser open, with only a few tabs. So if there has been memory leakage, it's not recoverable by closing the leaky programs.

what DE youre using? gnome is known to eat ram like crazy i had it constantly causing my ubuntu to use swapfile a s i had only 16 Gb now as I am at 32 GB ram I not seen it swap once

firefox as well not acts very nicely and causes sometimes swaps too even when the memory is not really filled

@Kusalananda Flag a post by mistake. lol....today with a really nasty flu, was in bed.

@Videonauth KDE. I've been assuming the browsers are the problem, but I haven't actually got any solid data to support that.

me neither and I'm someone who uses his 32 GB in some cases fully for math calculations

I suppose increasing the amount of RAM is an option...

But I think my memory slots on this MB are full. I'd have to toss my RAM sticks and buy ones which have more memory.

sometimes even using all of my swap too

the machine has actually an uptime of neraly 9 days

@FaheemMitha Yes, "of" is correct there. And what I mean by it as that the kernel_task process seems to grow over time. I'm not entirely sure this is a memory leak as it may well be accumulations of various internal buffers or whatever.

@Videonauth cool stats. What is that?

Machine:   Device: desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: TUF B360-PLUS GAMING v: Rev 1.xx serial: 180937104901208
           UEFI: American Megatrends v: 1101 date: 11/05/2018
CPU:       6 core Intel Core i5-8400 (-MCP-) cache: 9216 KB
           clock speeds: max: 4000 MHz 1: 2960 MHz 2: 2474 MHz 3: 2609 MHz 4: 3132 MHz 5: 2527 MHz 6: 2741 MHz
Memory:    Used/Total: 8062.2/32091.6MB
           Array-1 capacity: 32 GB devices: 4 EC: None
           Device-1: ChannelA-DIMM1 size: 8 GB speed: 2666 MT/s type: DDR4

@RuiFRibeiro this is just my daily driver where i game, program and everything else on like using it as radio and tv too

so running it 24/7

@FaheemMitha desktop pretty much never (although I don't have one at the moment). Laptop only if necessary or I happen to move it or something. If the browser's taking up too much memory, I restart the browser. But that isn't an issue for me these days since I have 32G of ram on my laptop.

like my workstation tho, but i had until tow weeks ago only 16 GB and there i got alot of swapping even in low usage cases

Maybe I should also increase my RAM to 32 GB, and then, hopefully, live happily ever after.

Though I'm not sure why 16GB is not enough. The first computer I purchased has 128MB of RAM, and I was able to use it.

@FaheemMitha um...

That isn't a serious question, right?

@FaheemMitha linuxatemyram.com

@Videonauth Not even.

@terdon It's a serious question.

Simply that programs today are much more memory-intensive since more ram is available.

@FaheemMitha You can't compare them. Your computer today is orders of magnitude faster and the programs you run require a lot more RAM.

@terdon you having 32 GB in your laptop points me towards that your as lik I do calculate or prozess alrge datasets?

as i dont see you as a hardcore gamer

That's like wondering why modern cars have more horsepower than the model T and the answer is basically: because we can!

Still if i had to choose i would take the model T :D

@Videonauth Not really relevant. My machine is definitely swapping. Sometimes it sounds like an asthmatic grandmother.

because its an individual car on todays streets

@Videonauth No, I'm not. I play (a lot) of Civilization and some Total War games but that's it. I need a lot of ram because I regularly work with very large files, yes. Whole genomes etc.

@terdon Well, I kind of use it for the same things. I feel this is a serious regression. Let us return to the 1990s, when computational sanity prevailed.

@FaheemMitha Is it swapping while there's RAM available?

guessed that, same here i generate large and very large datasets with fractal generation

@FaheemMitha It did not. We still had serious RAM issues. Every machine I have ever had had too little RAM for me except this laptop.

@terdon I'm not sure whether there is RAM available or not. Linux is fairly coy about that. But I don't see why RAM shouldn't be available. I'm really not doing anything much with my machine. At all.

@FaheemMitha free will tell you

@FaheemMitha You are using a browser and a graphical desktop. Those two are memory hogs.

:48811075
free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:       16333076     3290196     7785260      110624     5257620    12592628
Swap:       8388604     3150676     5237928

@terdon Yes, but neither of those actually do much. And I was using them in the 1990s too.

@FaheemMitha They do loads. And your browser in the 90s was a totally different beast. Modern browsers are basically mini-OSs since so many applications run in them. You cannot compare them to old-school rendering engines at all.

Same goes for the GUI. Basically, as hardware improves, software is written to take advantage of the modern abilities.

@terdon If you say so. I don't feel happier, though.

That I can't help with! :)

yeah and since they had the idea of sandboxing every browser tab the memory needs are insane

@terdon Some restraint would be nice.

@Videonauth Hmm. That increases memory usage, does it?

yes

$ ps -aux | grep firefox
michael   3514  2.0  2.5 3500300 829892 tty2   Sl+  Jan23 262:30 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -new-window
michael   3609  1.6  1.8 2896708 606132 tty2   Sl+  Jan23 208:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 1 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 1 -prefMapSize 181673 -schedulerPrefs 0001,2 -parentBuildID 20181207224003 -greomni /usr/lib/firefox/omni.ja -appomni /usr/lib/firefox/browser/omni.ja -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 3514 true tab
michael   3661  0.2  0.8 2185868 283080 tty2   Sl+  Jan23  37:39 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 2 -isForBrowser -prefs…

Free seems to say I have free memory. So why is my computer swapping? Is my MB or RAM dysfunctional? Or is my computer cursed?

i only have one firefox running

@FaheemMitha What is your vm.swappiness value?

@Videonauth Yes, I see similar things here for chrome/chromium.

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

@FaheemMitha Change that to 10 or so.

@terdon Oh?

@terdon Is that safe?

I used to do it all the time.

Although this comment is intriguing:

Gilles apparently doesn't think it is a good idea, at least.

Bah, what does he know?

Joking apart, that does make sense. But I know that making this changed on my older machines definitely improved performance.

And I must, I don't see what difference it would make in this case. If there is plenty of RAM available, why on earth would the machine swap? It makes no sense.

@FaheemMitha That's what that value controls as I understand it.

@terdon I guess I could give it a try. But I'm sceptical.

Look, it isn't dangerous. So try it and if it doesn't help, put it back.

But it was one of the first things I always did on new installs to reduce swapping.

@terdon Sure, but even so, it surely wouldn't use swap unless it needed to.

May as well ask someone who understands the kernel better though. @StephenKitt?

@terdon Fair enough.

How do I change it?

@FaheemMitha well it does. That's what I've been telling you.

@FaheemMitha Didn't I give you a detailed guide?

@terdon It swaps when it doesn't need to? Well, that's a very naughty machine. I think I shall write a stiff letter to the Linux people.

I think I'll ask for a refund.

@FaheemMitha I'm sure you'll get one for the full amount you paid :)

I wonder if RAM is cheaper these days. My computer is from 2013.

@FaheemMitha Much

@terdon Possibly not in India, though. Checking Amazon India.

From 2013? And you're surprised it doesn't work well with modern software!?

@FaheemMitha Everywhere.

@terdon What's wrong with 2013? It was a good year.

Perhaps not cheap but it will be cheaper.

@FaheemMitha Computers are not wine.

@terdon LOL.

So unlike wine and humans, they do not improve with age :P

To quote Terminator Genisys - old, not obsolete.

Is this a desktop?

@terdon Yes. Or a workstation. Depending on terminology.

I'm thinking of building a new machine in case this one falls over and dies.

That could happen.

@FaheemMitha : 485.00 rupees seems pretty cheap and that gets you 2G of RAM.

@terdon Does it? Interesting. Is it of the modern variety?

amazon.in/Kingston-KVR800D2N6-2G-Channel-Desktop/dp/B0012Y0QT8/…

I'm not sure I could buy 2013 era RAM now.

@terdon Ah, Kingston.

Not saying you should get this one, you need to be sure it matches your machine and you should ideally try and get RAM sticks in pairs, so the details will depend on the specifics. But the price is around there, yes. RAM is cheap.

So what kind of RAM are the kids using these days?

Amazon India has a little menu, like so:

@FaheemMitha Whichever your machine has.

@terdon I mean the flavor of the month. Or year.

@FaheemMitha The answer is the same.

@terdon Not if your machine is 10 years old, for example.

Hmm, it just occurred to me that it's now 2019, so maybe 2013 was a while back.

Time does fly.

@FaheemMitha If it is 10 years old, you still need the RAM that your motherboard can deal with so yes, the answer is the same.

@terdon I mean, you could toss the machine aside and go off and buy another one, with newer RAM. Then the question would be, what would that newer RAM be?

dunno

DDR3, probably, but maybe one of the others. SDRAM? No idea.

My laptop tells me it has DDR4 actually. Which I've never even heard of before.

Ah, DDR4 seems to be SDRAM

@Videonauth Oh.

@Videonauth Is DDR4 == SDRAM?

Or is DDR4 SDRAM a type of DDR4?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR4_SDRAM ?

@FaheemMitha sudo dmidecode --type 17 | grep Type:

> SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) is a generic name for various kinds of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) that are synchronized with the clock speed that the microprocessor is optimized for. This tends to increase the number of instructions that the processor can perform in a given time.

> DDR SDRAM is a double data rate synchronous dynamic random-access memory class of memory integrated circuits used in computers. DDR SDRAM, also called DDR1 SDRAM, has been superseded by DDR2 SDRAM, DDR3 SDRAM and DDR4 SDRAM. ... Thus, with a bus frequency of 100 MHz, DDR SDRAM gives a maximum transfer rate of 1600 MB/s.

@terdon Thanks, that's helpful.

I have 4 4096 MB modules.

or sudo inxi -m which will give you even a bit more information

sudo inxi -m
Memory:    Used/Total: 3465.6/15950.3MB
           Array-1 capacity: 32 GB devices: 4 EC: Multi-bit ECC
           Device-1: DIMM0 size: 4 GB speed: 800 MHz type: DDR3
           Device-2: DIMM1 size: 4 GB speed: 800 MHz type: DDR3
           Device-3: DIMM2 size: 4 GB speed: 800 MHz type: DDR3
           Device-4: DIMM3 size: 4 GB speed: 800 MHz type: DDR3

Memory:    Used/Total: 8113.3/32091.6MB
           Array-1 capacity: 32 GB devices: 4 EC: None
           Device-1: ChannelA-DIMM1 size: 8 GB speed: 2666 MT/s type: DDR4
           Device-2: ChannelA-DIMM2 size: 8 GB speed: 2666 MT/s type: DDR4
           Device-3: ChannelB-DIMM1 size: 8 GB speed: 2666 MT/s type: DDR4
           Device-4: ChannelB-DIMM2 size: 8 GB speed: 2666 MT/s type: DDR4

this is for example no SDRAM

Note that it's ECC, which may not be totally trivial to get here.

yep ecc is quite expensive

What does capacity: 32 GB mean? That means the total capacity of the computer is 32 GB?

@Videonauth Not necessarily much more expensive. Just harder to get.

@FaheemMitha yep

@FaheemMitha I guess so.

Ok.

on some boards you have even multiple arrays a 4 slots

So you'd probably want to buy two 8G sticks.

specially on double processor boards etc

@terdon You mean 4 8 GB sticks.

@FaheemMitha If you want, sure. That's even better.

@FaheemMitha check your motherboards documentation before going out to buy RAM

But 2x8GB would already give you a boost and will be half the price, presumably.

@terdon Well, I don't have any spare slots, and there is no point replacing the memory to get the same amount of memory.

older boards have limitations of how much the board alows the processor to adress

@terdon No spare slots.

Oh, perhaps you mean just replace two of the slots?

@FaheemMitha You would replace 2 4G sticks with 2 8 G sticks, ending up with 2x8 + 2x4 = 24G

@Videonauth Of course. And I wouldn't go anywhere. I'd buy it on Amazon.

:D

@terdon yes, I could do that.

Next time I'll try to keep some slots free.

yes just for example if your board only alows 16 GB to be adressed then you would only be able to use more ram if you change out the board which can get pretty expensive with older porcessors

as well ddr3 ram sticks raise in price actually a lot due to the lower production on those, most companys now produce mainly ddr4

@Videonauth I'm pretty sure this machine can handle 32 GB. I remember it from before.

btw th e computer information i posted before is from inxi too there is the command sudo inxi -MCmG

sudo is needed to get dmidecode info for the ram

@FaheemMitha it can, that's what your output shows.

       Array-1 capacity: 32 GB devices: 4 EC: Multi-bit ECC

@terdon Yes, that too.

So, a 8 GB ECC DDR3 stick costs around Rs 8000 here, so not that cheap.

Around Rs 1000 per GB. So around Rs. 32000 for 32 GB.

yep and prices are rising by the day

@Videonauth Possibly not here.

The prices here are already inflated.

Non ECC RAM is somewhat cheaper. That would be closer to Rs. 24000.

i get a 2 stick ddr4 2666 32 GB kit ecc multibit for under 250 euros

@Videonauth Is that a lot?

yes it is

@Videonauth So a total of 64 GB? 2 x 32 GB?

Never mind, I'd missed a 0

@FaheemMitha 2 times 16 = 32 in total

@Videonauth Don't show him arithmetic! He's a mathematician, counting confuses them!

@Videonauth Oh, pardon me. So 2 x 16 GB sticks.

chuckles

@terdon I'm just fine with counting.

So 250 vs 400 euros.

Yes, that's a big difference.

the price increase happening is that modern machines all run on ddr4 and the most producers changed their assembly lines for that and only producing minimal amounts of ddr3

dwindeling products but still high demand

simple economics

Maybe ebay or something like that would be a better bet then.

@Videonauth No, it's because one gets ripped off in India.

Everything electronic costs more here.

Sometimes much more.

the ddr3 is expensive here too

and the prices are rising

@Videonauth But as you've demonstrated, not that much.

already since a year

the 250 are for ddr4

@Videonauth Oh

they are cheap

ddr3 is here almost the same price as it costs you in india

almost

@Videonauth Huh

yeah like i said dwindeling stocks and still high demand = rising prices

Well, dinner time. Thank you for the educational conversation, folks.

Back in a bit.

ram is expensive pretty much anywhere. In the past, I used to buy it from the UK.

viking use to have compatible RAMs for any equipment you needed

bah....feeling old today. Two flu bouts in a row are not good.

that was 1997

@Videonauth Yep, had friends with that. I had other interests.

that was 1996 1997

@Videonauth Some people were crazy about that. Thought 97 is no longer my childhood.

in 1996 I was 24

@Videonauth retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3314/…

@Videonauth 26

@Videonauth wrong link. It was meant to be this one retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2570/…

@Videonauth You are the age of my younger sister.

hehe had one of those too in between the tiny tiger II and the vc 20

@Videonauth almost had a vc 20, got a timex tc 2048 instead (98% compabtile ZX spectrum, portugal, poland and usa )

after the vc 20 i had c64, c128 D, amiga 1000, amiga 500, amiga 2000 OS/2, pentium I 90 then a longer while nothing and then PIII, intel q9550, intel i5 4690K and now the i5 8400

@Videonauth After that had a XT, 386, 486DX, meanwhile started working

then a shitty NEC notebook compaq rebranded somewhere around 2k

then only bough a powerbook G4 around 2006

and a couple of mac notebooks in the meanwhile...also had a lot of corporate notebooks

ah ok the only apple i ever really was interested in was this one g.co/kgs/n6EFst

@

after that , no and nowadays aple ? no no no no

@Videonauth Not much found of Apple nowadays, dropped iphone and with a xioami

@Videonauth As for the current Mac notebook, got a sweet deal in a black friday

I never owned an apple product in all my life and i will not in future if i can prevent it

@Videonauth Besides Lenovo, the alternatives are pretty much shitty for one reason or other....

next stop for me is the i9 9950k

@Videonauth cool.

i.e. the EXTREME edition

i will wait a bit sstill got this i5 from a friend now and its already pretty powerhouse with it 6 cores

@Videonauth I lost a bit of the fever of having the latest and shiny with the 486DX33

lol

in 1-2 years maybe when the prices have dropped

@Videonauth yeah

im not going to pay 2500 US$ for a cpu

and i dont like AMD somehow

@Videonauth At the moment i am on my corporate issue Lenovo...one the few using Linux, work for the biggest ISP here.

@Jesse_b hmmm?

@RuiFRibeiro EXTREME

@RuiFRibeiro well i have a linux addiction since jan 2016

no windows machine in my household anymore

@Videonauth I gravitate between Linux, Mac and FreeBSD....

i think i#ll stick to linux, and since proton is such a great success i think i will even not have to have a windows VM anymore

(no windows here either)

@Videonauth not much into gaming.

the only caveat actually are the nvidia drivers above version 400

they introduce a bug which breaks many games on proton/steamplay

and fun thing is the windows drivers which are on par with them have the same bug

@Videonauth lol

this is why i stick to the 2nd latest dev driver for vulkan 396.54.09

it breaks transform_feedback for the withcer III when i use the 415.27 and it breaks the planet surface calculations of elite dangerous

my wild guess is that they messed something up to support their RTX cards lineup

@Videonauth probably.

well im a gamer by heart and a hobby math fan especially fractals fascinate me

@Videonauth I had two university mates that were mad about that stuff...dunno if one of them already delivered his thesis.....

well i just find it fascinating dong it as a hobbyist

beside python programming (love python and i came from c++)

@Videonauth Knew several people mad about fractals in the 90s

@Videonauth I came from C....did some small projects in python.

I still am and i have a feeling we not have discovered all whats there to know about

@Videonauth Had a galician mentor in the late 80s that did fractals in his Amiga

I remeber, they took forever even for a small precision

@Videonauth yeah

@Videonauth Everything took forever that time.....Things evolved so fast too.

and still today the limit is still the RAM and Diskspace

@Videonauth I am not also trilled with the stagnation on raw CPU speeds.

well murphies law cannot go on forever i think

@Videonauth maybe.

at he moment they designed the first multicore cpu's this prognosis stagnated

@Videonauth I think you meant moore's there....

the fequency speeds not raise anymore by 100% since then

and yeah

@Videonauth The raw frequency stagnation does not make so appealing changing a machine every so often

I actually wonder if quantum computing will restore that

@Videonauth I have read a very interesting article about some project of a guy making quantum computers for investigation for unis and stuff like that where the gov mandated he lowered the freq of operation out of "national security concerns"

hehehe yes but well the bigste quantum computer you can buy right now is from IBM and it has 6 QBITS

but still not for the end user, you have to go into a partnership with IBM to get one of them built for you

i imagine this is pretty costly still given the fact that the are big need a lot of surounding equiptment to run etc

@Videonauth probably.

On the other hand i would love to run fractal camputing on such a machine :D

@Videonauth encryption cracking!

@Videonauth Gotta leave chat, enjoy the rest of your day

well hmmm yes but i think it will still take a while till they are able to factorize very large primes, given that the rieman hypthesis is still not proven

you too

@terdon That AU answer is rubbish, and psusi’s comment is correct. Changing swappiness doesn’t directly control when the kernel starts swapping, it controls where the kernel reclaims memory when it needs to.

Low swappiness makes the kernel reclaim from the page cache first, high swappiness makes it swap to disk first. Appropriate settings depend on your I/O workload, not on your RAM usage.

@Videonauth What was 1996-1997?

tamagotchi :)

yeah i had by accident edited this message insteadof typing a new line (thanks to my cat)

@StephenKitt So is my scepticism justified?

@StephenKitt but doesn't that mean that low values mean less swapping and, assuming your disk is pretty slow, that results in a faster machine?

That has certainly been my experience.

And we have a better discussion here:

> Conversely setting the vm.swappiness to 0 will prevent the kernel from evicting anonymous pages in favour of pages from the file cache. This might be useful if programs do most of their caching themselves, which might be the case with some databases. In desktop systems this might improve interactivity, but the downside is that I/O performance will likely take a hit.

@terdon for most highly-interactive use-cases, yes, because you don’t revisit files all that often and when you do it causes delay when you expect it.

That's what I've seen: reducing the swapiness value made my desktop more responsive. I did not notice any adverse effects, although they may well have been some.

@StephenKitt So then it does make sense to lower the value for a home machine, doesn't it?

@terdon it’s hard to come up with a general rule but yes, it’s worth trying, but it won’t perform miracles (e.g. when your working set is larger than RAM)

Technically you’re potentially lowering overall throughput but interactive behaviour will align with expectations better, which greatly improves the user experience.

No, not miracles, but it should help @FaheemMitha speed up his machine.

ah stephen, while youre here, how does it come that linux filesystem omits // in paths so cd ////home/$USER////Downloads still works

@Videonauth I think that's POSIX

It's certainly standard.

For example, a large compilation won’t kick everything into swap...