Linux Performs Poorly In Low RAM / Memory Pressure Situations On The Desktop

'It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems
especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the
performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being
responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this
week. From a report:

Developer Artem S Tashkinov took to the kernel mailing list over the
weekend to express his frustration with the kernel's inability to
handle low memory pressure in a graceful manner. If booting a system
with just 4GB of RAM available, disabling SWAP to accelerate the
impact/behavior, and launching a web browser and opening new web pages
/ tabs can in a matter of minutes bring the system down to its knees.

Artem elaborated on the kernel mailing list, "Once you hit a situation
when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available,
the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse
pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely
sure why). You will not be able to run new applications or close
currently running ones. This little crisis may continue for minutes or
even longer. I think that's not how the system should behave in this
situation. I believe something must be done about that to avoid this
stall."'

-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/06/1839206

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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