Computer memory issue ...

[TheFu]

Why have laptop prices gone way up btw? Is there a mem or cpu shortage?

Supply and Demand. COVID-19. More people needed laptops for their kids school work and to be able to work from home.

Just add more storage or replace the storage you have. That should be fairly cheap, unless you bought a laptop with eMMC soldered into storage. BTW, don't do that - EVER.

If you want guidance for other things, post inxi -Fz output. Use code tags for that, or it won't be readable here. I assume there are many different models of "hp-stream" devices.

[CelticWarrior]

unless you bought a laptop with eMMC soldered into storage.

Exactly that. 32 GB years ago, now 64GB.

BTW, don't do that - EVER.

Why not? As long as you have the correct expectations for the device then you got a reliable ultra-light media player laptop for cheap, very capable for the realistic tasks it can do for the next 2-3 years, maybe a little longer, and then you dispose of it and get yourself a more modern replacement.
The problem here is unrealistic expectations for a laptop that already passed its due date.

[TheFu]

Exactly that. 32 GB years ago, now 64GB.


Why not? As long as you have the correct expectations for the device then you got a reliable ultra-light media player laptop for cheap, very capable for the realistic tasks it can do for the next 2-3 years, maybe a little longer, and then you dispose of it and get yourself a more modern replacement.
The problem here is unrealistic expectations for a laptop that already passed its due date.

Many people don't intend to buy a new system every 2-3 yrs. Clearly the OP and I do not. I have a laptop still being used from 2010. It is powered on now. Used it for about 2 hrs earlier and use it daily still for specialized stuff that aren't worth moving anywhere else (specific hardware). The internal storage on it was 320G, then 500G, then 750G and now it has a 1TB black drive. I think the discrete AMD GPU will fail before anything else does. If only the Core i5 CPU it came with had an iGPU, I'd be much happier. The battery life on that laptop always sucked. New, I think it got around 2 hrs, max.

I'd still be using my 2012 Acer Chromebook C720 if my attempt to swap the keyboard didn't brick it.

Always have a way to replace storage for any laptop and I don't mean via USB3 or MicroSD. Real storage. So when the current storage dies - all storage dies eventually - it can be cheaply replaced. We need to vote with our $$$ and end crappy hardware from being produced. There just isn't any need for eMMC today outside embedded, high-vibration, situations.

The planet needs us to use stuff longer.

IMHO.

[dbee]

Yeah, so the biggest drains on the system were GIMP which is a memory hog. But quite reasonably so IMO.

And chrome. Which seems to open a new process for every tab. Since http is stateless and a non-persistent connection. I wonder what the idea behind opening a new process for every tab is?

Never did any chrome programming or extension programming so I can't say I know much about the internals. But it seems excessive.

After the system crashing again, I figured I'd do a little spring cleaning and try to bump my swap to the suggested 4GB to see if that made any difference.

So I'd moved all my git projects to /mnt/microsd which freed up some storage space ...

dara@dara-HP-Stream-Laptop-11-y0XX:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev              949628        0    949628   0% /dev
tmpfs             194464     1400    193064   1% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2  29407228 25762812   2127568  93% /
tmpfs             972300    77780    894520   8% /dev/shm
tmpfs               5120        4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             972300        0    972300   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1    523248     8596    514652   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs             194460       16    194444   1% /run/user/1000

Then it was a case of releasing as much storage capacity as possible ... so i ran another ..

du -h | sort -hr | more
1.6G	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome
853M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Profile 1
646M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Default

It turns out that google-chrome in .config is 1.6 freaking GB.

dara@dara-HP-Stream-Laptop-11-y0XX:~$ du -h ~/.config/google-chrome | sort -hr | more
1.6G	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome
853M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Profile 1
646M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Default
499M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Profile 1/Service Worker
492M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Profile 1/Service Worker/CacheStorage
231M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Profile 1/Service Worker/CacheStorage/8
cbb992fe0cd9ef960e69a214646bd270516a23e
212M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Profile 1/Service Worker/CacheStorage/4
c237d5e33167c88df3e45d9c8b59fdd4d727472
189M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Default/Service Worker
182M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Default/Service Worker/CacheStorage
157M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Default/Application Cache/Cache
157M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Default/Application Cache
147M	/home/dara/.config/google-chrome/Default/Service Worker/CacheStorage/8cb
b992fe0cd9ef960e69a214646bd270516a23e

What should i do about this chrome directory? Apprently .cache is 586MB. So I enter

 chrome://settings/clearBrowserData

in the chrome URL bar. Which clears only 184MB according to chrome...

dara@dara-HP-Stream-Laptop-11-y0XX:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev              949628        0    949628   0% /dev
tmpfs             194464     1400    193064   1% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2  29407228 25347436   2542944  91% /
tmpfs             972300    74360    897940   8% /dev/shm
tmpfs               5120        4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             972300        0    972300   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1    523248     8596    514652   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs             194460       16    194444   1% /run/user/1000

But my calculator seems to suggest that it freed 415 MB from my system. Plus I can't find the cache file any more.

I'd like to keep my google-chrome cache file from building up... does anyone know whether i can delete the cache file on system boot from the crontab perhaps?

crontab -e
@reboot rm -rf ~/.config/google-chrome/cache

Is this safe? Or should i use the above method to delete via chrome?

Lastly, this is how i readjusted my /swapfile to reset it from 1.6GB to 4GB which is the recommended max for a 2GB RAM system ...

sudo fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
sudo swapon --show
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

only do the last command if cat /etc/fstab doesn't have a swap file listed/mounted already.

It's a pity that chrome lite only comes in android and tablet flavour.

Also, 2 more questions ...

1) Should i move the /swapfile to /mnt/microsd or will there be lagging/connection issues do you reckon? According to the ubuntu docs. It's a good idea to move it off your main harddrive.

2) Is it a good idea to move my work files to /mnt/microsd? I'd prefer not to lose them, but i have most of them backed up...

3) How do i slim down the .config/google-chrome/Profile 1 854MB profile file? I could do with the storage.

My harddrive is now at 100% capacity since I expanded my /swapfile. Bummer. Time for a new computer I think.

[dbee]

Didn't need to touch the google-chrome/profile afterall. Turns out that ./var/lib/docker/overlay2 the docker image file was 6.5 GB.

I only use docker for wp-env to create WordPress containers and run themes, plugins etc...

I don't need to store any docker networks, volumes, connections etc...

So i ran a...

docker system prune -a

and it freed up 6.5GB on my system. Plus i can still run wp-env.

I added the command to my crontab to run it on reboot everytime and things are sorted.

[TheFu]

is this solved? Use the THREAD TOOLS button so people can search and find it as solved.
If not, hw faults and kernel issues are next. to check. Look in the system log files.

Browsers run tabs in different processes for security reasons.