[Discuss] Hoggish software was: Linux Kernel Building

[worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

> From: Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org>
>
> Well, guess what: Once I quit Chromium, my 8GB machine has *plenty* of 
> RAM for kernel compiles. On a "-j8" make 46% of my RAM gets to be cache 
> and buffers. If I want still more, I could quit Thunderbird. 
> (Thunderbird doesn't seem to be designed for efficiently handling tens 
> of thousands of messages in my inbox, huh.) Or I could quit Signal. (A 
> "modern" program, therefore it needs a half GB of RAM to just sit there, 
> doing nothing.)

This is probably my age showing, but:

My assumption is that if a program is running but idle, and you run
something else heavy-duty, the aforesaid program should get swapped out
and stay out of the way of e.g. your kernel build.

Back when my first laptop had 16MB of RAM and Slackware, the disk would
spin down if it wasn't used.  I noticed that once an hour it would spin
up for a minute.  I never tracked down the program that was writing to
the disk once an hour.

So the issue you are having seems to be that Chromium etc. still
execute, and hit a lot of RAM pages, even when they're not doing
anything for you.  Are there good strategies for avoiding this sort of
thing?

Dale