dandv
Sat Dec 29, 2012 9:31:44 am
I was testing Zorin OS 6 from a Live USB. I have 4GB of RAM in my Dell E6410.
After opening a few memory intensive tabs (Gmail, Google Spreadsheet), Chrome apparently ran out of memory (I also had WINE running). The problem is that Chrome took down the entire system with it - the mouse cursor started to jump, I couldn't close other applications, and clicking the close button on Chrome's window took SEVERAL MINUTES to terminate Chrome. In the meantime, System Monitor would show memory usage close to 2.0GB (~50%) and CPU utilization around 50% for all four cores.
This is bad. If a process runs out of memory, the OS should remain stable.
Same problem on Ubuntu 12.10, though to a lesser extent (Chrome is faster to close a tab, which saves the situation).
On Windows 7, I would get an alert that memory was running out, and I could close tabs or other applications. Seems like on Ubuntu, the system just becomes unresponsive.
To make Zorin more user friendly, a user-friendly frontend to a memory-limiting mechanism like ulimit or cgroups should be used.
After opening a few memory intensive tabs (Gmail, Google Spreadsheet), Chrome apparently ran out of memory (I also had WINE running). The problem is that Chrome took down the entire system with it - the mouse cursor started to jump, I couldn't close other applications, and clicking the close button on Chrome's window took SEVERAL MINUTES to terminate Chrome. In the meantime, System Monitor would show memory usage close to 2.0GB (~50%) and CPU utilization around 50% for all four cores.
This is bad. If a process runs out of memory, the OS should remain stable.
Same problem on Ubuntu 12.10, though to a lesser extent (Chrome is faster to close a tab, which saves the situation).
On Windows 7, I would get an alert that memory was running out, and I could close tabs or other applications. Seems like on Ubuntu, the system just becomes unresponsive.
To make Zorin more user friendly, a user-friendly frontend to a memory-limiting mechanism like ulimit or cgroups should be used.