I do literally nothing to keep resources low. I just use my computer and it doesn’t seem to let me down. I rarely break over 6gb usage ever. Currently:
By eschewing all forms of personal land & sea mining, voting for like-minded pollies, harassing companies to get out of fossil fuels & stop being fossil fools, moving my superannuation to a fund manager with similar ethos & acceptable performance, buying only what i need not want, going vegetarian, not wasting food, minimising driving to the point of virtual abstinence, stop using my gas space heater in the mornings & now only at night [hence wear 42 layers of clothing]…
Today running Plasma with 4 gigs is totally possible and without lags.
With respect to lowering the indexation, it does not make much sense, really everyone knows how the bag fits, it is simple.
You have little ram and a modest processor, in addition to a little skill, so run a window manager like Openbox or a lightweight desktop like LXDE, maybe XFCE without much cosmetics.
Also some i3 or JWM, etc.
In the end, it’s like life itself, only you know which way to go.
My resources are already quite limited. I use Xfce or LXQt desktop environment. I don’t run unnecessary services. I also close programs that have not been used for a long time.
If you don’t have a lot of RAM, and if you also have a rotating hard disk or an old SSD, you should have a look at zram.
In my experience, it makes swapping much less “intrusive”. Although it might sound weird, on a 4G machine you can give zram 1G from your RAM. Don’t reduce your swappiness (vm.swappiness) value too much in that case, because you do want swap, especially when it’s faster than your storage devices are.
Arch Wiki has enough information to get you started.
IMO the easiest way is to use systemd-swap.
My old Core2Duo with 4G is rarely in use, but it still makes for a plesant experience for simple multi-tasks. No, you can’t open 100 tabs in Firefox, I’m afraid!
I spent years doing what you’re doing and I got tired of it.
I spent about 220 US dollars so I don’t have to think about it. But there was a time where I didn’t have the resources to spend that money, so I cherish what I have now.
Really? Where? Please post or even PM me the link where that’s from. I’d be interested in reading it. I definitely have swap on both computers. . . Both computers are also laptops and I really enjoy hibernate. One has a partition, one I used a swapfile. I will probably redo the one with the partition eventually since it’s on an SSD and I’ve read it’s not great for the drive. But I can’t live without hibernate.
I stopped using a swap partition yonks ago [i have 32 GB ram in Towie & 8 GB in Lappy], never bothered with a swap file, & only run systemd-swap to [try to] be one of the hoopy froods, not coz i actually need it.
You’re not alone. I had a swap partition in Manjaro and decided not to implement one in my EOS installation because most of the time it was not used.
Since now nearly 2 weeks with EOS I never reached 50% of my RAM. Seems I don’t need a swap ( partition or file)…and I never hibernate.
Every time I made a swap partition I regretted it. That was about 5-6 times before I got smarter and stopped doing it.
It was typically too big, wasting space on my drive, or, in one case, too small, not enough for my laptop to hibernate.
I only use swap files now (or nothing). They are much more flexible than partitions. Sure, it’s slightly more difficult to setup hibernation with swap files, but I only have one computer that I ever need hibernating, my laptop.
I don’t like systemd-swap very much, it does not seem to be very reliable. I think it’s only good as a “just in case” measure on systems that have plenty of RAM.
Yes, on my main desktop with 32 GiB of RAM, I don’t use swap, either, there’s never any need for it. My other desktop has 16 GiB of RAM and I made a small (1 GiB) swap file for it, just in case, which is never used.
However, my laptop has only 5 GiB, so it needs swap (and I want it to be able to hibernate, so it needs swap for that, too). I gave it a 7 GiB swap file and it works fine.
