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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

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Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#151

I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.

That's because windows always uses swap by default, and your system will freeze if you run out of swap which is usually 33 gigabytes, or ir your drive and ram are full.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#152

I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.

I stopped using swap almost a quarter of century ago, and since then I have not seen a PC with Linux freezing because of full RAM. Before the recent increase in RAM prices, it was not difficult to have a generous amount of RAM in a PC, that would make very unlikely the out-of-memory situations. When OOM really happened, it was much better to become aware of this immediately, and reduce the number of concurrent thread…

My PC doesn't have swap and it freezes for about 20 s when I run out of memory until the OOM killer finishes its job, usually by killing Code or more rarely Firefox. I'll take this over the machine swapping so slowly that I need to hard reset anyway, but I'd appreciate it if the OS could stay more responsive when it happens.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#153
post #131
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS too sadly. by the time you realise there's a problem the machine is already comatose and unresponsive all these electron apps and invisible virtual machines (looking at you Claude) really don't help.

Macs are also real bad at handling low disk space. I don’t how other OSes do but the best advice on a Mac is to always have a decent amount free. What’s a decent amount? No idea. Don’t test it :)

When my Intel Mac ran out of disk space once, it became impossible to clear the space without rebooting (due to APFS's annoying journaling crap or whatever -- it would literally say "rm: can not remove [whatever]: no space left on device" or something), which caused Google Chrome to wipe all my local storage and cookies because it loves to do that when you run out of disk space, and there's no way to get that data back even if you do somehow clear space with the browser still running. I've been bitten by this many times on at least four different platforms. I wish it could just keep everything on disk instead of deleting it all? Like anything that deletes my data automatically can just go die in my opinion. This is one of the reasons I don't use Google Chrome anymore, another is how it deletes "old" history too (after 3 months) even if you have terabytes free, which is just so offensive I can't even explain it. Ungoogled Chromium lets you turn some of this stuff off, but when I moved to Mac I just started using Safari.

The only way to save my file system was to boot into recovery mode and run a verification with Disk Utility, then I was able to remove some files and get my space back.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#154
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running an unsupported OS is even more risky, especially with the excessive number of security updates needed while AI finds RCE after RCE.

Eh, pretty much all my network exposure is via Firefox, which is actively supported.

Your network exposure is via the windows network stack first, then Firefox.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#155
post #92

I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.

From my experience, Windows does freeze and become completely unusable too, just not usually from RAM usage hitting 100%. I don't use Windows much, nor do I care much about that environment, but from what I've seen it seems to keep RAM usage below 100% most of the time. What I do see pretty often is the drive getting stuck at 100% usage instead, which makes the whole system ridiculously unusable anyway.

Windows uses eager memory allocation, and applications will die when they allocate (and think image editor loads a beefy image) or fail to start when it runs out of memory.

Linux uses lazy allocation and overcommits, so what dies isn’t necessarily what you would expect thanks to the OOM killer.

With a fixed swap size windows doesn’t necessarily slow down as it runs out of memory.

YMMV if you don’t have 64 gigs of RAM and a 64 gig swap.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#156
post #92

I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.

From my experience, Windows does freeze and become completely unusable too, just not usually from RAM usage hitting 100%. I don't use Windows much, nor do I care much about that environment, but from what I've seen it seems to keep RAM usage below 100% most of the time. What I do see pretty often is the drive getting stuck at 100% usage instead, which makes the whole system ridiculously unusable anyway.

Windows will aggressively page out as you approach RAM usage, MacOS does the same but based on activity iirc. On Linux if you just set up paging (forgot how i did this on arch) you won't have any issues.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#157
post #11

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out. Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday…

[1] Linux 7.2 Reverts DRM Scheduler Change After Serious GPU Regressions: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-72-reverts-drm-sc...

Fedora users got burned. My friend had strange artificing after updating so rolled back to 7.1

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#158

I see all the comments about how Windows and Linux handle OOM, but I suppose I'll also mention macOS. On my M4 Max Mac Studio if I try to load too big of an AI model with protections off, the desktop starts glitching back and forth between the past few hundred frames. It looks bad when it happens but CtrlC still works to kill llama.cpp and if you were using LM Studio, SSH also works. Once you kill the offending proce…

On my M4 Max MacBook Pro, if I run or even load an LLM more than a couple times, even a small one, general desktop performance starts to get really, really bad until a reboot and I don't know why. Genuinely, everything starts feeling super sluggish, even long after the process has terminated -- cmd+tab gets slow, apps constantly hang for a few seconds at a time, the cursor position starts lagging and videos are slow…

Wow! That is wild.

I am on 15.7.9 and I have had uptimes in the high 50s with weekly local model usage, I even tried GLM5.2 streaming from SSD and I have not noticed any slowdowns after at all. I guess you are right about 26 and 27. Dang, the more I hear about 26 I am just so glad that I did not update. What version of macOS are you on? 26 or 27? Have you considered doing a custom backup and restoring manually to 15.7?

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my M4 Max MacBook Pro, if I run or even load an LLM more than a couple times, even a small one, general desktop performance starts to get really, really bad until a reboot and I don't know why. Genuinely, everything starts feeling super sluggish, even long after the process has terminated -- cmd+tab gets slow, apps constantly hang for a few seconds at a time, the cursor position starts lagging and videos are slow…

Wow! That is wild. I am on 15.7.9 and I have had uptimes in the high 50s with weekly local model usage, I even tried GLM5.2 streaming from SSD and I have not noticed any slowdowns after at all. I guess you are right about 26 and 27. Dang, the more I hear about 26 I am just so glad that I did not update. What version of macOS are you on? 26 or 27? Have you considered doing a custom backup and restoring manually to 15.…

Unfortunately I don't have the spare 8 TB. Been unemployed for 6 months, have not gotten a single offer in that time, + memory/storage crisis, etc. Shit's fucked.

I don't think I would downgrade though. I just hope this gets fixed someday... I can deal with the terrible memory bandwidth but I don't like to reboot.

(That said, macOS is so, so much better at reboots than Windows)

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#160

I hope there will be an update where when my RAM gets full my PC doesn't freeze and becomes unusable... I remember that Linux and Windows do this in different ways and Windows doesn't have the problem.

I stopped using swap almost a quarter of century ago, and since then I have not seen a PC with Linux freezing because of full RAM. Before the recent increase in RAM prices, it was not difficult to have a generous amount of RAM in a PC, that would make very unlikely the out-of-memory situations. When OOM really happened, it was much better to become aware of this immediately, and reduce the number of concurrent thread…

Mannnnn.... I've done similar and have NOT had the same experience. The problems I've had are usually because I'm loading stuff in a weird disk-memory-cpu trifecta and they all really want to push the remaining 30GB stuff into a database. Then it's off to ctrl-alt-f5 to wait for gnome to crash so I can auth in and kill the ravaging process.
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