It's only a problem if it doesn't give it up when other apps need it and there's not enough. Browsers just cache a bunch of shit in memory for speed and convenience, but they should unallocate it back to the pool if something else calls for it. The internet complaining about this for years and years are mostly doing so from a place of ignorance.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The issue is that browsers don't release much memory back to the system when it's needed. I wish they'd work more like the Linux kernel's VFS caching later, but they don't (and might not be able to. For example, I do don't think the Linux kernel has good APIs for such a use case).

[–] zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 9 hours ago

You can write limits to and then poll files in /proc/pressure/ to be notified of resource pressure. Systemd will also set an environment variable for similar files for your cgroup.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

It does release it back to the system. It only doesn't if you actively have a ton of windows/tabs open, in my experience. Even then, it'll cache stuff to disk after awhile. Like on my phone, I've easily had over 20 tabs open in Firefox (Android) and it doesn't suck up all of my phone's ram (which only has 12GB). If your system is running less than 16GB, then that's another matter and you really should add more, as 16GB is pretty much the baseline on computers these days.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

Mine is 32GB and Firefox as consistently and repeatedly refused to release the excess RAM back into the pool. So it doesn't work out as well in practice as it does on paper. I would agree that 16GB is the bare minimum though and if you have less you absolutely should get more if you can. Firefox needs at least 8GB to run smoothly, but a system that only has that amount or less will be bogged down by Firefox alone.