Re: 100 times more?
If your browser in Linux takes up 4+GB of RAM, you're doing something wrong, or just purposefully making it use so much RAM.
I'm not sure, perhaps you'll be able to tell me -- just what exactly am I doing wrong? And why would I want it to use so much RAM?
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To me it appears that neither Opera nor Firefox do good garbage collection under Linux and apparently both do much better under Windows.
$·free
·············total·······used·······free·····shared····buffers·····cached
Mem:·······2064280····1863740·····200540······13328······75868·····432020
-/+·buffers/cache:····1355852·····708428
Swap:······1637372······76488····1560884
(Sigh, oh well, that's as good as it gets, since the form here doesn't allow non-backing spaces in pre tags, and line spacing is all wrong.)
That's in a VM with 2 GB of RAM I'm currently using on a work laptop. Opening a couple of tabs to read news expectedly ups memory usage. Closing these tabs makes no difference. Opening new tabs should then reuse memory already allocated to the browser? No. It starts swapping like crazy.
This gets obvious with flash videos. They get slower and start stuttering, and flash eventually crashes (I can kill it and let it restart itself, but it doesn't help in the long run).
Worse still is that simply restarting the browser isn't enough. If flash crashed, it's not going to work for videos on restarting the browser. For some reason, a lot of memory is assigned to X. Restarting X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace helps with regards to X memory usage, but it still swaps like crazy. Flushing the buffers doesn't do anything. In the end, restarting the VM fixes the problem, but restarting anything is not a fix if Windows, of all things, doesn't need it -- one of the cited advantages of Linux was supposed to be that you don't need to restart your computer if you run into problems, you were supposed to be able to fix almost everything without rebooting except kernel panics and hardware failures. So what happened?
It's different under Windows. For some reason, memory usage goes up as expected. When closing tabs, it doesn't go down, but opening new tabs then doesn't result in memory usage constantly increasing. As though the browser tends to make better use of memory allocated to it.
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I stood against a lot of pressure to go to a corporate Windows install on my work laptop. I installed and maintained Linux (Mint 13 with MATE) according to all good practices. And I still had to restart Firefox at least three times a day to free up memory that it just didn't want to let go.
Begrudgingly, I had to install Windows (on the same hardware). My biggest gripe is that I don't have anything serious to complain about, so I can't make a compelling case to go back to Linux.
Serious question: What was I doing wrong? This is a bog-standard Sandy Bridge laptop with 8 GB of memory. I use a lot more extensions now, and yet memory usage is down and I no longer have to restart Firefox (or watch it crash) just because it's running out of memory.
Power usage is down, as are temperatures. I hardly ever hear the fan running these days.
And it's Windows 7, I don't know if Windows 8+ with its optimizations would help or hinder (I can't try it, since my laptop is too old and doesn't qualify). Some colleagues with new laptops are running Windows 8.1 on them after trying 7 and finding it's worse.
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Disclaimer: FWIW, I am (was?) a Unix/Linux fan. I never saw a reason to buy Windows for my home PC and I run it on Mint 17. Under Windows I vastly prefer Cygwin with bash to Powershell, which I haven't installed or ever intend to learn. And yet after being forced to use Windows, I'm finding it's better in some regards than Linux. There are certainly some things which drive me up the wall, but there's less of them than I have brought up in the past to stay with Linux on the corporate laptop, after using it for three years, going through a lot of trouble for using it instead of what everybody else used.
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Oh yes, and thanks a lot for using cloudflare and forcing us to go through CAPTCHA after doing several previews in a row (I was trying to get that pre to work). Oh yeah, and seriously? A layered drink is juice?