> According to the Phoronix reader involved with the Le9 work, he's reportedly able to run Mozilla Firefox with 37 tabs as well as having Skype, Discord, two PDFs, and LibreOffice all running on an aging decade old system with just 2GB of RAM.<p>What does the patch do? According to my very quick read it will lock some pages in the cache. And because they are talking about a swapless system it means it that the system will kill processes earlier because it runs out of memory earlier. Their viewpoint is that killing some process is less damage than have the everything running but thrashing and thereby unusable for the normal user.<p>That all makes some sense to me. Except that it absolutely does not explain how 37 Firefox tabs, Skype (which is a Chromium) and whatever they list there could suddenly run. The patch does not magically add available memory.<p>Something does not match in that story.
> According to the Phoronix reader involved with the Le9 work, he's reportedly able to run Mozilla Firefox with 37 tabs as well as having Skype, Discord, two PDFs, and LibreOffice all running on an aging decade old system with just 2GB of RAM.<p>I recall having more than 37 Netscape windows open on a system with 64MB, back in the 90s.