[Discuss] memory management

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 6/20/2015 4:18 PM, Mike Small wrote:
> Matthew Gillen <me at mattgillen.net> writes:
>> going to start swapping if it can. What I want for desktop environments
>> is behavior like: if you run out of memory, kill the thing that's
>> hogging the most.  My typical case is that if there is a process using a
>> ton of memory, it's probably doing something wrong (e.g. javascript, or
>> eclipse going into a death spiral because of the awful Android plugin),
>> and /that/ is what I want OOM-killer to murder.
>>
>> I suppose the right answer is to wrap the problem programs in a script
>> so that every time I start them I can
>>   echo 999 > /proc/[firefox-pid]/oom_score_adj
> 
> What about creating a second, less privileged user for running firefox
> and using ulimit to keep it down to size?  There are good reasons to not
> run firefox as your main user anyway, at least not for general browsing.
> I do this (minus the ulimit part), with the non-privileged firefox also
> having restrictive plugins. For banking and a small number of other
> sites I run firefox as my main user with no plugins. That way I don't
> have to worry about librejs or requestpolicy messing up a financial
> transaction. And if a site takes advantage of a firefox exploit it's
> somewhat contained, assuming it's not my bank that hosts the exploit.

That's not a bad idea.  I've found that if you use
  su - <username>
then you can run X programs as another user without trouble.

Matt