Not enough ram

Posted on January 18, 2023

I use a thinkpad flex 14 AMD laptop hooked up to my TV so that I can work in my living room. This is to keep my cat happy, who for whatever reason, hates my office room.

This thing has about six gigabytes of ram in it and I am constantly running into linux's oom (out of memory) killer. I am not doing anything crazy either, in fact at the time of writing this blog post this is the output of free -h

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           5.7Gi       3.6Gi       581Mi       120Mi       1.6Gi       1.7Gi
Swap:             0B          0B          0B

The processes I am running:

1. KDE
2. firefox
3. kitty
4. tmux
5. neovim

Of these the biggest offender is firefox (4 tabs open by the way), the reason being web developers have lost the sauce. Tabs are taking up more than 100mb a pop.

WTF?