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Comment by SuperSandro2000 | Hacker News Reader

SuperSandro2000·

Windows freezes, too and if you are a heavy multitasker with a program that hogs memory and you are not carefully it can happen wow frequently

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Windows definitely stalls less in those kinds of situations. I remember running both Windows and Linux on my old 2 core 4GB RAM laptop. On Windows I could have easily swapped out almost ten GB of memory and it'd still chug along, whereas Linux would be completely unresponsive after a couple of GB of swapped out memory and require a reboot. I wonder how much the pending MGLRU patch for Linux 6.1 would help with this.

The old Windows Task Manager has code in it that killed other programs to be able to start so the user could kill more programs.

I don't know if this feature still exists in modern versions since memory has increased so much but I always found it to be neat that some developers thought about this.

Sounds like a good idea for systems that are absolutely hammered. `htop` could add a `--kill` flag, or maybe `--kill-ram` / `--kill-cpu` which would first try to kill the most ram/cpu intensive application, and then load the UI.

I've ended up in a couple of situations where servers are so hammered it takes five minutes just to get a ssh session up and running because some process took up all CPU/RAM and was barely able to do anything in the server itself. Something like that could maybe help.

Basically kill -9

David Plummer wrote the Windows Task Manager, he made a 3 part series on his YouTube channel [1]. It's a fascinating couple of videos, highly recommend to watch.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8VBOiPV-_M

It's not even close. Linux overcommits memory by design.

If you disable memory overcommit, Chrome based browsers won't even start.

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