r/Ubuntu • u/Physical_Employer_47 • 21h ago

Performance stuck

Hey everyone,

​I’m a product engineer running Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS on a ThinkPad T460s (Core i5 6th Gen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD).

​My daily development stack involves:

​Concurrent VS Code instances & multiple workspace windows

​Multi-agent LLM / Claude developer tool setups

​Android application builds (Gradle compilation & indexing)

​Local containerized environments using Docker & local Kubernetes (K3s/Minikube/Kind)

​Naturally, 8GB RAM and a 4-Thread 6th Gen Intel chip create severe memory thrashing and long build times. Here is how I’m tuning my Linux environment to squeeze maximum performance out of this 8GB setup, along with my planned upgrade path to a Lenovo V14 G3.

3 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

6

u/Comfortable_Fix_1005 21h ago

8gb with all that running at once is just asking the machine to cry. gradle alone will chew through half your ram before you even open a browser tab

zram is the play here if you haven't set it up yet. way better than swap on an ssd for these older thinkpads, i ran a t460 for years and it was night and day once i bumped the zram allocation. also check if your docker stuff is pinning memory limits per container, default is usually unlimited and that'll wreck you fast

1

u/Physical_Employer_47 21h ago

I am already using the zram and also used the docker when needed otherwise they are stopped so let me know if i had to upgrade the machine which one is preferable?

2

u/Ambitious_Ad_3988 21h ago

Zswap max_pool_percent: 50% of total ram

compression algorithm: zstd or lz4

Disk swap size: matching the max zswap pool percent