Chromium 59 memory
 

According to HTop, relatively small amount of memory is resident and shared. Most of the memory allocated is virtual, meaning it can go onto swap or it is on swap. That is a good thing, right ? I think previous versions had more memory allocated as resident.

Chromium 59 on x86_64.

Swap holds temporary memory pages.

As long as you have a swap partition or a swap file you should be good.;)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/swap

This 'Addswap' section sums swap up.
http://docs.slackware.com/slackbook:install

I know what swap is. I am pleased that most of the memory allocated by Chromium is virtual. It is better than resident, leaves more RAM free. I think that resident portion was larger in previous versions.

If the resident portion is smaller in this instance than that's a good thing.

The current version of Chromium in the SlackBuilds repo is 53.
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...work/chromium/

How did you upgrade to 59? A tar.bz?

You have just to visit the Alien's Smithy, and you will find the Chromium 59 package... ;)

Found it here:
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slac...um/pkg64/14.2/

Swapping should only happen when your RAM is full. Using swap to free up RAM doesn't make sense since RAM is 10 times or way faster then your HDD/SSD. My RAM does 26GB/s and my SSD does only 550MB/s. Swap is useful in low RAM situations but it does slow down your computer significantly. Check your swappiness (/proc/sys/vm/swappiness) and set it to a lower number like 10 and reboot. Your PC should start to swap later now. I'm not having any swap usage using Chromium 59. Without changing swappiness.

I think that explanation is that Chromium initially requested a lot of memory from the system, but runs in much less than that. Unused memory is pushed onto swap. I think it's good that browser is using so little memory.

Using less memory is a good thing.

When you launch your Chromium Browser do you get a small window that that launches and wants you to choose a username and password for a keyring?

Probably what he meant was it allocates (or reserves if that word makes it clearer) a huge chunk of memory up front but doesn't necessarily ever use it. I don't run chromium, but I've seen lisp programs do this. (And what is a web browser but a large lisp system whose developers forgot to actually use lisp to write instead using C++.) Swap doesn't have to actually hold anything. So you have...

1. allocate, say, 10GiB of memory - i.e. call malloc with a huge number. No actual data is put into this memory yet so there's nothing to swap.

2. write stuff into that memory area - need to render some pages and run some javascript, say.

3. chromium combined with other processes do a whole bunch of number 2 using more memory than you have physical -- only now does swap need to be written to (well, maybe sooner to have memory for disk cache or because the kernel decides to knock out some stale pages predicting you won't need them).

4. if you run out of virtual memory (physical RAM + swap) your process will die or maybe other processes will be killed by the OOM killer. Surprisingly, depending on a certain configuration parameter, you can ask for more memory (step 1) than you have virtual. I don't mean just surpassing your ram because you have swap to fall back on but reserving (far) more than you have of both. You don't actually get a critical event happen until you actually put something in enough of that memory that you've used up what you have.

If you have a 32 bit system there's an event at 1 (or 4? -- no, I think it's 1) where you surpass the largest number in your address space. I.e. malloc can only give you back a (virtual) memory range with numbers larger than the largest 32 bit number.

As far as resident set size goes, that's not something Chromium controls directly. It's a behavioural property of the program in combination with the kernel's virtual memory management. It's a subset of memory chromium makes references to over some interval, what it needs regularly for the sort of work it's doing over that span, a working set needed to keep in RAM (as opposed to swap) if the program is to run well. It likely changes depending on what kind of web pages, APIs etc. it's dealing with. If it's small then you've got a lean program not having to process large amounts of external data. Is chromium's RSS small? Really?

Neat:-

What 'program' are you referring to?
{Since Chromium doesn't control resident set.}

My point is that previous versions of Chromium had larger resident memory segment. As far as I remember.

I don't have Gnome Keyring installed so it does not bother me. Once I had it installed by accident (with Xfce, I think) and it took me a while to figure out. Remove Gnome Keyring if it bothers you.

Thanks:-

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