JonasMar 6

One thing I obsess a little bit over is the fact that it’s 2026, we pretend that Linux is a serious OS, but we‘re still losing your data on a regular basis.

Out of memory conditions (OOM) are one of our biggest pain points, so I just did a quick experiment with macOS to see how they are handling OOM.

I loaded about 200 memory heavy tabs in Firefox and kept a close look at memory usage.

(1/4)

Show threadroot42Mar 6
@verdre you can disable memory overcommitment I think? Never tried that, as I rarely have issues with OOM. But it should give processes an error when they try to malloc, which they then could handle.
Show threadZack WeinbergMar 6

@root42 @verdre I have not tested this thoroughly, but I believe that a hefty chunk of Linux's problems with swap thrashing are, at root, caused by its default heuristic that allows 20% of RAM to fill up with data that needs to get written to disk, before it actually starts making write() wait for the disk.

20% of RAM nowadays can easily be in the gigabytes. It takes at least a few seconds to flush all of that to even the fastest SSDs. But it takes only milliseconds to fill it up.

Show threadjon r

@zwol
Actually I had this with a hard drive that writes 230 MB/s cached and between 1,5 and 9 MB/s constantly.

Even when the transfers were completed, of course they were not done, it took more than ten minutes to unmount the device, initiated right after finishing.
@root42 @verdre

Mar 7 at 3:58pmWeb