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I have been running Ubuntu on my much loved Acer Aspire 7735Z laptop since around version 8. It has Pentium Dual-Core CPU T4200 @ 2.00GHz and the maximum of 4 Gb RAM.

Now on 16.04, I typically find that running Thunderbird and 6 Chrome tabs will push memory use into 95%.

I have found that if the machine starts swapping, the desktop can become unresponsive preventing the shutting down of apps to reduce load. (It has an SSD and I wonder if the fast disk access can cause CPU starvation?)

In rough terms, gnome-shell takes 1Gb, Chrome 2Gb, Thunderbird 1Gb. I used to run Eclipse and a load of other stuff and didn't have these problems.

Questions: does this sound "normal" or is there some issue which I should investigate. If normal, any suggestions how to manage memory use? If wrong, any suggestions how to investigate?

Many thanks in advance.

Jon Kemp
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  • Sounds completely normal. You may try for instance xfce, which is a bit lighter, so you may save some RAM. – vidarlo Apr 05 '18 at 11:41

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You can erase the swap by running

swapoff -a

swappon -a

This will deactivate and activate swapping again.

You can as well try to lower the 'swapiness' which means, the system will prefer to keep the swap file smaller instead of caching as much as possible. It is an older thread, but check this one out: https://askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swappiness

Community
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If your system is swapping, that means you do not have enough RAM. You can disable swap with:

sudo swapoff -a

and removing everything to do with swap in /etc/fstab, but this is NOT recommended. Instead of being slow, when the system runs out of RAM with no swap, the Linux OOM killer will start killing off processes. So, instead of having your desktop react slowly, you just won't have a desktop :)

One thing you can do is decrease your swappiness level, which can be done with:

sudo bash -c "echo 'sysctl vm.swappiness=10' >> /etc/sysctl.conf"

or even 1 to swap the least possible without disabling it. Then, for these settings to take effect, you'll have to reboot.

user8292439
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Chrome is a memory hog. I would recommend trying Firefox. The new versions are even slightly faster than Chrome. :)

Also, I'd recommend installing Lubuntu. It's a disto of Ubuntu specifically optimised for computers with low-end hardware. (I think it can even run on 256MB of RAM)

You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
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