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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

#231

Post by cobar »

stillpointlab wrote: post #190
krisknez wrote: post #34

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.

This gripe (that I literally crashed out on recently after maining Fedora for the first time) is top of my list for annoyance/frustration with Linux as a desktop. I now have btop permanently running in a Terminal and I habitually Alt-Tab to it to watch my swap. As soon as my free memory gets less than 1 Gb I kill any Firefox tabs (the memory black hole). I know this won't be popular, but Linux people have some kind o…

Same problem I've had. On a 24GB MacBook Air, I can have a VMWare VM, Lima and an IDE and a bunch of Chrome tabs loaded and the system is fluid.

Meanwhile if I try something similar on a 32GB Linux system, it will sputter or outright freeze. Suspend the system at 16GB used and on wakeup it takes 15 seconds to get back to full responsiveness.

Yes, some of this can be addressed with swappiness settings, however that behavior isn't partically clear and doesn't take into account that depending on your workflow on a given day (e.g. coding then video editing) different swap behaviors may be more optimal. Nor does it help for people who are trying to get good productivity out of a 16GB or lower system.

The one thing that has helped is moving to Brave Origin. Whether that's loading less JS ad SDKs or general optimization, it does seem to use a lot less ram than Edge/Chrome.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#232

Post by pjmlp »

manwe150 wrote: post #186
Espressosaurus wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The difference is Linux has fork, while Windows doesn’t, so Linux cannot do accurate accounting (without wasting a lot of memory) while Windows can.

macOS is a UNIX as well, and it isn't the only UNIX that manages to do accounting properly.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#233

Post by cobar »

stillpointlab wrote: post #200
parl_match wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux Desktop people have been singing the song of "works for me" for decades, which is as long as they've been unable to crack double digit users.

I mean, I'm to blame at the moment as well. I'm putting up with it because I don't want to use Windows, mostly because I'm doing a lot of agent dev and I saw them struggle in a Windows environment. And there is a little spite driving me since Windows 11 is full of ads and I felt like it was pushed on me when I wanted to stay on Windows 10. The vast majority of my computer use has been on MacOS for the last 15+ years,…

If you have an extra NVME slot you could look at picking up an Optane 800P drive. Extremely low latency reads and writes, which makes it ideal for swap. They're available for ~$100 on eBay.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#234

Post by mrec »

frollogaston wrote: post #183
mrec wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about Win10 reaching EOL is not being at the mercy of Windows Update any more. It was by far the biggest risk to having a functioning system.

Seriously my spare PC became so much less annoying overnight. It used to not only auto-reboot but also add some fresh non-dismissed nags with every update. Now it's just the nag to install Win11, which, I'd rather eat my entire PC.

Oh god that "OOBE" horror. I almost got locked out when it demanded a Microsoft Account login, which I never use for anything. I'd only just grudgingly acquired a portable telephone at that point; without it, I'd have had severe difficulty getting at my mementos.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#235

Post by bsimpson »

I have a Z1 Extreme that has 16GB shared between the CPU and GPU (what AMD calls the APU). I've noticed that mangohud, the SteamOS utility that shows performance diagnostics, often reports RAM + VRAM numbers that exceed 16GB. I've been curious as to why. I presume it has to do with compression or something.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#236

Post by mrec »

dieortin wrote: post #154
mrec wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the CVEs I've seen for that stack are in DNS, and Firefox's DNS-over-HTTPS implementation bypasses the OS DNS almost completely in sensible configurations.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#237

Post by NekkoDroid »

stuaxo wrote: post #64
londons_explore wrote: post #23

I'm mostly excited for the VRAM savings from apps and games which have loads of unused or super rarely used textures. Game developers often aren't super careful with this stuff, and there could be literal gigabytes of data which isn't used at all.

Are there any people out there doing this optimisation post-release for existing games ?

I don't know about that specific optimisation, but I remember Helldivers 2 did drop support for loading from HDDs, which allowed them to deduplicate assets bringing the game down from what I remember like 120GB to somewhere round 30GB.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#238

Post by frollogaston »

mrec wrote: post #234
frollogaston wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously my spare PC became so much less annoying overnight. It used to not only auto-reboot but also add some fresh non-dismissed nags with every update. Now it's just the nag to install Win11, which, I'd rather eat my entire PC.

Oh god that "OOBE" horror. I almost got locked out when it demanded a Microsoft Account login, which I never use for anything. I'd only just grudgingly acquired a portable telephone at that point; without it, I'd have had severe difficulty getting at my mementos.

You can (could?) install Win10 with no MS account by disconnecting it from the internet. But that was the only way. And you can't disconnect it halfway through the install, it has to be disconnected at boot.

I don't even mind making an MS account, I have one, just don't want Windows using that account and thus constantly freaking out about stuff like "you haven't enabled 3-factor auth." For all I know could also lock me out one day like they did with Minecraft.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#239

Post by chongli »

aeyes wrote: post #104
chongli wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they finally going to fix the issue of having introduced a second right click menu that forces me to click “show more options” literally every single time I want to do anything?

Yes, they made it customizable. Here is a video showing the new options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX_WsBnuLf8

So that means I can finally put my 3rd party context commands into the main menu instead of having to always show more to see the legacy one?

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#240

Post by Groxx »

phiresky wrote: post #213
stillpointlab wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gripe (that I literally crashed out on recently after maining Fedora for the first time) is top of my list for annoyance/frustration with Linux as a desktop. I now have btop permanently running in a Terminal and I habitually Alt-Tab to it to watch my swap. As soon as my free memory gets less than 1 Gb I kill any Firefox tabs (the memory black hole). I know this won't be popular, but Linux people have some kind o…

Which OS are you using? systemd-oomd (or similar) afaik is enabled in many modern releases and fixes it. The default settings (on Arch) make it kill stuff when your CPU is spending 60% of time on reclaiming memory over some time period. So you'll get 20 seconds of lag, then it is fixed. By killing a program, yes, but how else do you expect it to work? If your RAM is not enough you have to kill stuff. And I really dou…

Freeze as many applications as necessary to reserve room for the DE so I can choose what to do?

Surely that's obvious to other people aside from me. It's an attended system, not a headless server in a rack hundreds of miles away that must not ever alert someone.

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