VS code or in this case VS Codium crashes suddenly when I open a large project or repo.
Turns out, earlyOOM was killing it, since I didnt have swap, so memory was the only factor needed to trigger “out of memory”.

Solution:
Enable swap, this guide could be of help.

If it continues to happen, you need to reduce the aggressiveness of earlyOOM or exclude the problematic app.

  • bruh@nord.pubEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    I keep hearing this however I am using SSD for 5 year with swap enabled. it didnt make any diffrence. does it make it slow?

    • spartanatreyu@programming.dev
      2·
      3 days ago

      SSDs have a limited number of reads and writes. Once a unit of memory in the SSD reaches that limit, it is essentially burnt out and it can’t be used again.

      SSDs hide this burn out in two ways:

      1. Have a little bit extra memory, so when a write fails it can be silently written to another unit instead, and the end user doesn’t see the size of the drive go down.

      2. Don’t store data in the same place, spread data around evenly so the wear is spread around.

      The problem is after a certain point, all the memory units are at the edge of burning out and the drive fails irrevocably.

      Luckily, most of us aren’t filling and emptying our entire drive over and over again (and in doing so wearing out the drive), so most of us won’t run into this issue.

      But using part of an SSD is really bad for the drive since RAM tends to be accessed and written to much more frequently which wears out the SSD.

      We’re seeing increased failure rates now in the M series macbooks since they use “unifed memory” (they put both RAM and VRAM in the same storage without increasing overall capacity) and needed to use their own SSDs as swap disks when they ran out of RAM/VRAM.

      • boonhet@lemmy.zip
        1·
        2 days ago

        Uhh aside from the 15" and 16" models with dedicated graphics, Macs have had unified memory for a looking time now. As have all computers without dedicated graphics.

        Out of curiosity, are your users running a ton of local LLMs? Because overall failure rates of the SSDs aren’t high at all so I’m suspecting the users you support are doing something different

        The Neo might turn out to have issues here because it only has 8 gigs of RAM which is no longer a thing with Airs, but that remains to be seen.