Comment on I can't pay rent because devs just don't care
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 week agoAlso the only time I’ve heard “memory is cheap” used IRL was in backend development. Because it’s cheap to scale up memory on your servers, but not cheap to spend a day or 2 hyperoptimizing a solution that’s fast enough. Dev time is expensive.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Or for workstations. It’s a lot cheaper to add a stick of RAM to a workstation than optimize workflow a bit.
There are many cases where RAM is not cheap:
If you control the machine, RAM is cheap, until it isn’t. If you don’t control the machine, you should always keep an eye on RAM, because once the complaints start coming in, you’ve already started losing customers.
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 week ago
MacOS has weirdly fast paging and shit, you don’t feel the lack of RAM immediately. But in the long run it’ll kill your (also soldered) SSD so that’s even worse for heavy users.
I think phone apps have more to play with as well nowadays. A Galaxy A55 can have 12 gigs of RAM now. That used to be considered overkill for even flagships, let alone midrange phones, just a few years ago. Plus both operating systems will suspend apps running in the background when needed.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
My phone is pretty recent and has 8GB RAM, and it’s still fairly common to find phones with 4GB RAM. You really can’t rely on a consistent amount of RAM, so being careful with memory is still important.