Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Just wanted to make a quick note on some things I've noticed trying and using different browsers on Bookworm64.

The lowest RAM browser Ive seen so far that is "modern" is Firefox ESR. LibreWolf is a close second. Floorp comes in after that, but I had some minor graphical glitches with it. Brave varied but was somewhere between Floorp and LibreWolf but I'm just not very fond of Brave for some reason.

In my Firefox based browsers (including Floorp), the main addon set included: ublock origin, sponsorblock for youtube, improve youtube!, dark reader, youtube nonstop, return youtube dislike, i still dont care about cookies, and a translation addon. A dark theme is also used.

Overall, it seems the "Resting" RAM use of Bookworm64 for me is around 1.35GB, which seems a little high in my opinion but is doable on my setup.

On an unrelated but related note, Damn Small Linux booted live rested at about 135MB of RAM with around 500-800MB with Firefox ESR running.

This is all for this post. Any feedback? Personal experiences? Thoughts?

If you're just reading that RAM usage from the on screen Conky it may not be accurate. When I first tried Bookworm in it's early days I also thought the RAM usage when in an idle state was excessive, so I queried it.

See this post here https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=9027

There are many ways to measure RAM consumption, each tool has its own formula. Some tools measure allocated memory, some measure 'resident' memory that's actually in use and some even include cache. Cache can distort the picture a lot because in a computer with several GBs of RAM, cache can take GBs and this memory is freed automatically if needed (so it's not really reserved for anything, and it's "used" only temporarily).

You'll probably see much lower, closer numbers, if you echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches in the terminal before you check RAM consumption. This clears cache.

Regarding Firefox - it can be configured to reduce RAM consumption. Some Puppy releases (maybe only mine?) use https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/w ... _FIXUPHACK, but the vast majority doesn't. If you browse to about:config and set dom.ipc.processCount to some low number (like 4) you'll see that RAM consumption drops significantly.