Arch Linux

UntoldTitan

Member

Registered: 2023-04-24

Posts: 10

[SOLVED] Surface GO - 4GB RAM, Optimization

I have a Surface GO that I recently installed Arch onto, loving it so far, but I have noticed that the 4GB of RAM built into the laptop is quite the bottleneck.
I'm wondering what the best way to optimize around this would be.

Currently, I am using the cutefish-desktop enviroment, and firefox as my main browser.

I do plan on doing some programming with VSCode, NodeJS etc.. I was able to do that when I had windows on this machine.

What are some tips and tricks I should know to optimize my arch installation?

Last edited by UntoldTitan (2023-05-01 16:43:43)

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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Surface GO - 4GB RAM, Optimization

4GB ram is huge in my book.  Replace cutefish with a non-bloated wm and vscode with a non-bloated editor (vim if you're sane, emacs if you're not).

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

icar

Member

Registered: 2020-07-31

Posts: 560

Re: [SOLVED] Surface GO - 4GB RAM, Optimization

NodeJS consumes a lot of RAM. You might want to have swap *and* zswap (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/zswap). Then make sure to not have many things open at the same time :-)

UntoldTitan

Member

Registered: 2023-04-24

Posts: 10

Re: [SOLVED] Surface GO - 4GB RAM, Optimization

Thanks guys, I'll have 8GB of swap on a partition setup, I'll add zswap, and I'll consider changing my desktop enviroment.

Is there a way to measure how much each process is using? So i could see how much RAM or resources cutefish is using?

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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Surface GO - 4GB RAM, Optimization

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … m_monitors

EDIT: sorry, that list is actually crap.  You can use top / htop for a simple overview, or read the `ps` man page for invocations that will get you the data you want.

Last edited by Trilby (2023-04-24 17:21:07)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

UntoldTitan

Member

Registered: 2023-04-24

Posts: 10

Re: [SOLVED] Surface GO - 4GB RAM, Optimization

Thanks! top works great.

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3beb6e7c46a615a

Member

Registered: 2021-03-27

Posts: 165

Re: [SOLVED] Surface GO - 4GB RAM, Optimization

You may also want to setup a user-space out of memory (OOM) daemon to selectively kill resource-intensive programs before the kernel OOM handler randomly kills large amounts of more or or less processes to reclaim memory.  Personally, I have had good experiences with systemd-oomd on a equally weak system, but your desktop environment needs to cooperate or you need to get in the habit of running every large isolated process with "system-run".  I've heard good things about earlyoom, but never used it.  The wiki has a list of alternatives at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … m_monitors

EDIT: sorry, that list is actually crap.  You can use top / htop for a simple overview, or read the `ps` man page for invocations that will get you the data you want.

You probably wanted https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … k_managers