I have macbook air with M1 chip, I wish I could change to linux but unfortunately I cant so I try to stick as much as possible to using open source on macos. But i cant understand why FOSS apps take up so much space in memory. I’m even getting messages that says that I dont have space left in memory and i must close apps, and I thought that chip M1 was enough with 8gb of ram. I send a pic of my memory usage.
Huh. It’d be interesting to see how much memory LibreOffice or some such takes on a Linux system.
I’d test myself, but I’m currently on a Raspberry Pi and my beefy box is a) off and b) all the way over there.
I just opened an empty Writer document to check the RAM usage. On Fedora 39, it is using 161.0 MB. I opened an empty Calc, and the RAM usage increased to 223.9 MB.
Thank you, less lazy stranger.
My first guess would be emulation for apps that do not run on aarm by default.
A lot of OSS devs don’t want to spend time supporting a closed architecture. Especially some of the more privacy and openness focused apps that you’re running.
This is what I’d wager. I remember reading that apps using Rosetta (is that what it’s called ?) take up more resources.
I have macbook air with M1 chip, I wish I could change to linux but unfortunately I cant
Why not? Fedora Asahi works pretty well. When was the last time you tried it?
I am not one of these people who’s constantly surveilling RAM. But I look at it occasionally and I don’t really see anything unexpected in your screenshot. Maybe you could load up comparable non open source applications doing the same task and show the comparison? How does Safari or Edge do if you create a comparable session?
Right now on my linux computer, Firefox is using 1 GB of RAM. I have lots of tabs open so that’s typical. Sometimes it is higher. You are using logsec, zotero and libreoffice which suggests you are conducting research and writing. So I will guess you also have lots of tabs. And maybe browser extensions? The zotero web clipper that looks at every page you load to see if it is scrapeable? Maybe a markdown clipper doing same thing?.. And there is a good chance those other applications are working with a lot of data like your whole citation database, whatever you are writing etc. Do you have any of those zotero extensions that do all kinds of fancy stuff to the items you add? Not to mention Thunderbird and whatsapp. It is a lot of stuff for the computer to do.
In firefox (and presumably librewolf) you can go to
about:processesto see exactly what is going on. This page with your thread is using 59 MB. Also you can go toabout:unloadswhich has a rudimentary method to remove background tabs from memory. With only 8gb of RAM you should make a habit of this. You can also get extensions with more sophisticated unloading methods and that might be worthwhile for you.All that said, I think an 8GB RAM machine is likely under-powered for your task. To be fair I am making assumptions based on the applications you have open. because when I have those sorts of applications open, I am typically being quite demanding of the computer. Opening documents, converting filetypes, scraping metadata, OCR, passing information between applications, interacting with databases, drafting documents, searching email archives… and lots of tabs.
I am really surprised that Apple would sell a laptop-type device with only 8gb in the modern era. I always think of them as expensive but good hardware (if you are using them the way Apple intends). If my assumptions about your work are correct, life will improve if you can scrape up some more RAM.
16GB should be the absolute bare minimum with 32GB being standard at this point.
Selling 8GB high end laptops like macbooks with soldered RAM shouldn’t be a thing at all. It’s such a waste of resources, because devices which could be used in 10 years won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.
The only reason Apple has them is to have a low starting price while taking 200 USD for 8GB additional RAM. For context, 16GB RAM costs about 50 USD in retail.
won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.
Not even that. For most basic users, web browsing is by far the most resource-intensive thing they’ll ever do, and it’ll only get moreso. If it weren’t for modern web design, most users could honestly probably be okay with 4GB or 8GB of RAM today. For a laugh, I tried using a 512MB Raspberry Pi 1B for all my work for a few days. I could do absolutely everything (mostly developing code and editing office documents) without any problems at all except I couldn’t open a single modern web page and was limited to the “retro” web. One web page used up more resources than all of my work combined. I’m guessing it won’t be too many years before web design has evolved to the point where basic webpages will require several GB of RAM per tab.
(I agree with your overall point, by the way. Soldering in 8GB of RAM these days is criminal just based on its effects on the environment)
I think we should strive for either:
- Not building/using piece of shit platforms MacOS that is very wasteful when it comes to memory management.
- Not building/using piece of shit applications like electron-based stuff or the window server from this post.
There is no reason why 8gbs shouldn’t be enough, excluding gaming.
Mh, that’s unfortunate. Do closed-source apps use less RAM? Like MS Office compared to Libre Office? Not sure if it would be fair to compare Safari to Librewolf since it’s probably optimized for MacOS. I think generally programs become less RAM efficient since people tend to have more nowadays.
This isn’t exactly true. My guess is your app profiles are either bloated, and/or your measuring your RAM usage incorrectly/unfairly.
On my M1 MBA for instance, a fresh profile of LibreWolf (+ child processes) uses 514 MB. Compare this with a closed-source browser like Opera (fresh profile) which takes up a massive 1183 MB. Vivaldi uses a but lesser RAM compared to LW, but it’s still a comparable amount (486 MB), whereas the new and fancy Arc browser uses 587.3 MB.
Now, LibreOffice on the other hand does take up more RAM than MS Office by default - 475.4 MB - but it works a bit differently to MSO, because LO uses a single binary for all office applications, unlike MSO where each office application is it’s own app. But if I were to open a blank Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and a blank LO Writer, Calc, Impress documents, they use approximately the same amount of RAM in total (~750 MB).
Open source apps are taking up so much memory because you’re running open source apps.
If you were running proprietary apps, then proprietary apps would be taking up so much memory.My guess is not optimized or not optimized for your OS. Plus there may be an extra layer to make it compatible that may be resource hungry. That being said, I’ve seen my fair share of resource hungry paid and closed apps too.
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