GNOME's GLib Adds GMemoryMonitor As Another Step In Helping Cope With Linux RAM Pressure

With the new GNOME GLib 2.63.3 library release is a new "GMemoryMonitor" API for allowing notifications of when an application should attempt to free any non-critical system memory in an effort to help the system cope with memory pressure.

Red Hat / GNOME folks back in August announced the Low-Memory-Monitor project for helping cope with Linux RAM/responsiveness issues while another step is now ready in addressing Linux desktop responsiveness problems when low on RAM. This next step is the GMemoryMonitor API that is part of the newly-released GLib 2.63.3.

GMemoryMonitor when hooked up by the application allows to be notified of memory pressure events via the low-memory-monitor project. The hope is the application will then voluntarily free some unnecessary memory whether it be caches, data that can be dumped to disk or easily regenerated, or other scenarios in order to free up RAM on the system.

More details on this new API can be found via this blog post.

This is great should many GNOME-focused applications decide to make use of it while an out-of-memory killer for Linux as a more generic approach and last stop is still being explored.

Details on other GLib 2.63.3 changes can be found via the GNOME Gitlab.