Is the High Price of RAM a Good Opportunity to Promote FreeBSD?

cracauer@ said:
What I have not seen is benchmarks themed "what happens when you run out of RAM?". The basics wouldn't be too difficult to do, but there are so many variables to consider once you get down to metal. For example, how does it score if one OS already killed a process and the other one did not? Did that OS do a good job or not? Obviously if the other OS managed to pull through with all processes unkilled it would win this benchmark. But what if it becomes unresponsive for 25 minutes while doing so? Is that still "better"?
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and yeah i'd say that's almost like the OS is shooting itself on the foot because if the whole thing becomes unresponsive that means the task it was doing can't keep going well, so it'd be better for the OS to just kill it and the user would have to come up with a way to make it work again

cracauer@ said:
As I said from anecdotical evidence my eyes absorbed in the last decades FreeBSD is really good at pulling through without killing and excessive slowdowns. Just good decision making when paging.
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yeah i gotta give FBSD bonus points for that

AlfredoLlaquet said:
My FreeBSD runs out of RAM and everything keeps working fine. I just notice now some occasional delays when I change from one app to another.

View attachment 24920
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what kinds of apps are you using there? i have 16 gigs of RAM with no swap and it rarely goes that far, even when compiling heavy stuff
 
ruby R53 said:
what kinds of apps are you using there? i have 16 gigs of RAM with no swap and it rarely goes that far, even when compiling heavy stuff
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Two Windows 11 VirtualBox VMs with 4 GB RAM assigned to each one and a lot of other stuff. Normally I don't have so many apps running at the same time. I just wanted to show that my FreeBSD keeps all the apps running almost seamlessly even when I run out of RAM.
 
AlfredoLlaquet said:
Two Windows 11 VirtualBox VMs with 4 GB RAM assigned to each one and a lot of other stuff. Normally I don't have so many apps running at the same time. I just wanted to show that my FreeBSD keeps all the apps running almost seamlessly even when I run out of RAM.
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i see, well i think compiling www/chromium alone would already be more stressful to your pc than all of that lol
 
AlfredoLlaquet said:
A Windows 10/11 desktop without debloating it extensively? It seems surprising.
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Windows seeming;y uses more RAM if its available; I've seen 1.1-1.3GB use 4G RAM minimal debloating (don't have to debloat what doesn't exist LTSC :cool:), and my usual laptop does 1.7-2GB with 16GB (stuff like DWM and Explorer are less than 100MB; Intel's GPU + RST driver stuff adds a little vs computers that don't need those drivers).

GNOME I've seen 1.1-1.3GB min, Plasma 6 slightly higher, and Xfce 600-900MB. On my webserver FreeBSD is about 600MB now, but I've seen 400MB use randomly in the past on Linux relatively same nginx/PHP stuff. Overall FreeBSD seems on-par with reported RAM use vs other OSs.
 
Windows is very chatty and gobbles up RAM. Excess above the loaded kernel is used for file system cache.

The ideal way to debloat windows is at install time, not by post install bloat removal. This is done with an XML script used by WinPE at install time which configures the windows installer to not use unselected components.
 
I noticed that my Linux 4GB RAM crapbook works much better with the zswap + nVME drive; it stopped to heavily slowdown because too many tabs open with the browser. I am very curious to know if FreeBSD does something similar to ZSWAP.
 
Windows 11 out of the box is laggy as all heck on my laptop. Replaced it with FreeBSD 15.1 and that same laptop runs like the wind with Plasma + Wayland.
 
freezr said:
I noticed that my Linux 4GB RAM crapbook works much better with the zswap + nVME drive; it stopped to heavily slowdown because too many tabs open with the browser. I am very curious to know if FreeBSD does something similar to ZSWAP.
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No.

I tried experimenting with geom_uzip(4) and swap-backed md(4) but couldn't get much further.
 
For some time I used a vdev on a compressed pool for swapping. That went smooth, pretty impressive. The only reason I stopped was I needed system core dumps to debug something. And with the amount of memory the refurbished laptops have that I use, swapping is mostly not a problem whatsoever.
 
Crivens said:
For some time I used a vdev on a compressed pool for swapping. That went smooth, pretty impressive. The only reason I stopped was I needed system core dumps to debug something. And with the amount of memory the refurbished laptops have that I use, swapping is mostly not a problem whatsoever.
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This can very well work. Only on Linux it seems not recommended to use a zvol for swap:

FAQ — OpenZFS documentation

openzfs.github.io openzfs.github.io

But needs careful investigation. On Linux I thought that zram was better than zswap and it's not the case.
chrisdown.name

Debunking zswap and zram myths

zswap and zram are fundamentally different approaches with different philosophies. If in doubt, use zswap.
chrisdown.name

BTW, thanks to this post I came across this:
https://kldload.com & https://github.com/kldload/kldload

It looks like a meta-installer for multiple distros (even FreeBSD) installing ZFS inside with some extra profiles like desktop, hypervisor, etc. It makes the experience seamless by having the same command being usable across multiple distros. For instance, kpkg can be used for Debian's apt, Fedora's dnf & others. You can export the installation to qcow2 an other formats (also OCI) with kexport. Enough dope for today.
 
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