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Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
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MEMORY MANAGEMENT WITHIN LINUX

Ever wonder what’s going on under the hood of your current operating system? Ever wonder if your system’s task manager is reading the information correctly; would you like a second opinion? Are you aware of what “zombie” processes are? Today’s modern Linux or Unix operating systems handle memory fairly well. They do this by caching the RAM used by recently opened applications so that when they are opened again, there will be less load time and latency. Memory runs at a set speed, but in the case of modern systems, it’s the fastest bit of hardware in your system.

Within Linux, everything you do has a consequence, but don’t let that scare you, Linux knows when RAM is being used and when it is not. When RAM is no longer being accessed, small amounts get reclaimed by the system. Usually this works without issue, but seeing as loading applications from the hard drive can be slow, this procedure takes time. Linux likes to store much of the existing apps in RAM for as long as it feels is needed to ensure that it doesn’t put the same amount of strain on the drive again.

The problem, however, is that many of the inactive bits get thrown into a separate place on the drive when new apps need the same amount of memory that is being held. We call this problematic feature “swap”. Swap occurs generally when a certain threshold of RAM is being used. This usually only takes the current inactive files in RAM and moves them to a free portion of the hard drive that was previously set up during installation. When it needs the file(s) again, it will already know where they are and will fetch them back into memory. I say problematic because of the way it writes data to precious SSDs as well.

Memory is handled at the kernel level and so it is important to take into account the current situations with Meltdown and Spectre as some patches for these are still going on. RAM is usually inexpensive these days and so it’s recommended that everyone at least have 8 GB memory as a bare minimum, however, some of us only have access to 6 right now. To check how much RAM you have available you need to run a couple of commands in the terminal. I will leave a screenshot to show you just what I mean, but the first command is really simple, just type free -h. 
Free will show you up to about 6 columns displaying total, used, free, shared, buffered, available, the column you want is total to see how much your system recognizes.

Most motherboards have a set limit to how much memory they can accept. It is possible to work around this issue by updating the bios, but not everyone has the expertise required to pull off such a risky procedure. To dissect the RAM usage even further, you will need to type cat /proc/meminfo. 
 This will give you a detailed list of what is reclaimable, what is not, what is dirty, cached, etc. Sometimes the system has a bad habit of swapping when it doesn’t absolutely have to, but this can be somewhat modified. To counteract the system’s longing to swap inactive pages to the disk, you should type the following in the terminal sudo sysctl vm.swappiness = somenumberlowerthan60, and to make this permanent, you will have to add a line to a file, in Ubuntu it’s usually /etc/sysctl file, however, in Manjaro or Arch, it’s /etc/sysctl.d/some number.conf. The potential range is from 0 to 100, but setting this to 0 could have a weird effect, this is why most people recommend 10 and with ssds I recommend 5 or even 1.

When using one of these commands, the numbers can be a bit skewed as well. Never take a low number of “free” RAM to mean your system is on its last leg. If you are running fine and do not notice a slow down, it could be that most of the memory is cached and not actually being used by anything at the moment. Still, a good practice is to make sure that you don’t have any zombie or otherwise crashed but still running processes in your process list. A neat command to do this is ps -aux to display the entire list, or ps A | grep processname to display trouble processes. For a real time view of this, Htop is a great program.

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