On Thu, 2022-01-13 at 08:45 -0500, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
So those background tabs tend to have things running along, and I do have to figure out this earlyoom to see if it might help here.
Oh, for what it's worth, you might find earlyoom to bring its own set of annoyances. If it detects you're close to running out of memory the behaviour is to try and kill off the process heavily consuming memory. It won't actually stop the application from using too much resources but let it keep on running.
i.e. Firefox will be quit, or it will crash.
The idea is that the errant application will be halted, rather than your entire system. Which makes sense, there's little else it can do, but you'll need to be able to manage resuming Firefox from where you last had it.
My experience with Firefox's restore last session feature was only with multiple tabs, not multiple windows. I know I can't manually kill multiple windows and than restart and get them all back, I only get back the last closed window. I've discovered that often enough when I've accidentally opened a new window instead of tab, and accidentally closed the wrong window. I don't know how it'll behave when it's been system killed.
Things like earlyoom are only trying to work around the actual problem, an errant program that really needs fixing. We know there are pages that try and use 99.9%, or maybe 101% of resources, there always has been, and there always will be, the browser needs to be designed to better handle that, rather than just expect the user (or OS) to quit the browser to regain control.