TIL!

Awkwardly, I find that the largest memory pressure tends to come from a particular web page that continually gobbles up more memory the longer it is open.

There’s always one of these somewhere, and I’m bad at closing tabs. I usually notice pretty quickly when I come back to my computer. As soon as we start hitting page filing, since everything is stuttering and slow, but if it goes overnight, it can literally be 15 to 20 minutes before the system is responsive again after I kill the offending process.

Whereas on my work device, which is Windows, I usually might not even notice until I’ve maxed out my page file, which can be 64 or 128 GB depending on the device. And even then, I only notice because file operations start getting slow because the SSD is being thrashed. Killing the offending process results in responsiveness usually within a few seconds and a full clear out of the page file in a couple minutes.

The explanations that I’ve gotten from another commenter make a lot of sense. That Windows has just always had to deal with high memory pressures, so has been forced to mature in that sense. It is rather odd that Linux is behind on this, though, given its overwhelming representation in headless environments