[chrismorgan]

My previous Linux laptop with 8GB of RAM (2014–2017 or so, I think) I never even got round to setting up swap, and I only ran into problems two or three times total (when running two or three Firefox instances and Chromium and a VM taking 2GB and a bunch of other things running—some of the biggest consumers, namely browsers, actually notice if they’re using too much of your RAM and adjust how they work so they don’t ask for so much RAM, at what I believe is a fairly slight performance cost).

On my current laptop and with my current habits, I’m consuming a lot more memory, and so the technique I use to avoid OOM is simply having 40GB of RAM. (As it happens, I do actually have swap set up at present, because certain circumstances meant I wanted to hibernate it occasionally; should disable swap again now I’m back to not needing to hibernate.)

[isthatafact]

> some of the biggest consumers, namely browsers, actually notice if they’re using too much of your RAM and adjust how they work so they don’t ask for so much RAM

Maybe there are reasons, but it is not nearly good enough -- I frequently run out of RAM and encounter OOM kills (prefer not to deal with linux swap), usually requiring a reboot. I really wish that I could just set an upper limit on (e.g.) firefox RAM usage -- 8GB for example -- instead of its insistence on using all of the unused RAM minus a couple to several hundred MB, which does not leave enough room for memory usage spikes. There might even be a way to set this buried somewhere in the config parameters, but I could never find it. It must be technically possible to set some limit because otherwise the browser would not be able to maintain a somewhat consistent usage just below the total system RAM.