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 threadmatzipanMar 7

@verdre they're not downloading more ram and your Firefox is still working so surely this is happening in the application itself. No?

I'm trying to think of a memory hog you could use to test this out but none come to mind. 😓

Show threadJonasMar 7
@matzipan They are actually downloading more ram, by just using more and more of the SSD as ram, all the way to the point where the SSD runs out of space. :)
Show threadmatzipanMar 7
@verdre your screenshot says swap used 0, though. So I’m not sure what you mean.
Show threadJonas
@matzipan ah yeah, that one’s just a random screenshot where there’s not that much opened yet.
Mar 7 at 5:49pmMastodon for iOS
Show threadmatzipanMar 7
@verdre but then... Linux has swap too
Show threadJonasMar 7
@matzipan sure, but distros aren’t using it by default, nor do we have a good way to dynamically manage swap. And if memory actually runs out, we just go on a killing spree and kill apps, rather than freezing them and letting the user decide what to do.