There are a multitude of web browsers for GNU / Linux, like Opera. It is precisely this developer who is the protagonist of this article today. And, although there are open source web browsers that are lighter, with more performance, more secure, respectful of your privacy / anonymity, etc., the truth is that there are not many like Opera GX. It is a browser for gamers.
Opera GX has come out alone for Microsoft Windows at the moment, but many gamers who use Linux were hoping that it would finally arrive for our favorite operating system as well and it would not happen like other similar Opera projects that have not finally arrived. But the truth is that almost a year has passed since the launch and still nothing.
This Opera GX freeware has some very cool features, like the GX Control. They are a series of utilities or browser tools with which you do not need to close the program to obtain more performance from the machine directed to other software. Instead, with GX Control you can choose how much RAM, how much CPU time and how much network the web browser will use at most.
That way, bandwidth, memory and CPU resources intended for video games would not be harmed. And you may think ... why are you telling me this if maybe Opera GX won't come to Linux, or maybe you're already happy with your web browser. Well, very simple, and in GNU / Linux you don't need GX Control, the power of the penguin is enough.
That is, you can use some options that GNU / Linux gives you to have your own GX Control without the help of Opera:
Limit the bandwidth consumed by a process:
To limit the bandwidth or network use of a process or program on your Linux, there are also several options. One of them is to use the trickle program, another is wondershaper. You should install both packages, as they are not pre-installed on the distros by default. Regarding the use, you can choose one or the other, as you prefer, although what Wondershaper does is limit the traffic of all the programs at the same time by network interface ... Here you have an examples of how trickle would be used to limit network consumption from, for example, Firefox:
trickle -d 40 -u 10 firefox
With that command, you are limiting network usage for Firefox to 40KB / s and 10KB / s of download and upload respectively.
Limit the RAM resources used by a process:
For limit the amount of RAM a process can use Anyone on Linux, be it a web browser or whatever you want, you can use the name of the program itself that you want to limit. For example, imagine that you are using the firefox web browser and you want to limit the RAM to only 0.5GB, that is, 500MB. For that, you can use systemd in this easy way:
systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=500M firefox
You could even use cgroups to modify groups of processes in one go ... And of course, ulimit as I have already explained in other LxA articles.
Limit the CPU resources used by a process:
If what you want is limit the CPU usage a program does, then this will interest you. For that there are several options, from using some tools that systemd gives you, to the famous renice, cpulimit, stress, etc. For example, use ps to locate the process (and its PID, for example, suppose it is in 8188) corresponding to the program you want to vary. Once you know, you can use renice to change its CPU usage. Remember that the accepted values range from -20 to 19, with the highest positives being those that would consume the least. If you wanted to give it the least favorable value so that it practically does not consume:
renice +19 -p 8188
Alternatively install cpulimit, since that package is not included in your distro. Once you have it installed, you can limit your CPU usage quota to, for example, 25% in one of two ways:
cpulimit -l 25 -p 8188 & cpulimit -l 25 firefox &
You can even go further and also make other types of limits or procedures, such as those of the I / O as I explained here.
Nothing bad is good to know