I chalk it up to lazy rushed development. Good code is art.
Comment on Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough
_number8_@lemmy.world 4 months ago
imagine showing this post to someone in 1995
shit has gotten too bloated these days. i mean even in my head 8GB still sounds like ‘a lot’ of RAM and 16GB feels extravagant
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Aux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s not true at all. The code doesn’t take much space. The content does. Your high quality high res photos, 4K HDR videos, lossless 96kHz audio, etc.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
But there are lots of shortcuts now. Asset packs and coding environments that come bundled with all kinds of things you don’t need. People import packages that consume a lot of space to use one tiny piece of it.
Aux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
All these packages don’t take much memory. Also tree shaking is a thing. For example, one of the projects I currently work on has over 5 gigs of dependencies, but once I compile it for production, the whole code based is mere 3 megs and that’s including inlined styles and icons. The code itself is pretty much non-existent.
On the other hand I have 100KB of text translations just for the English language alone. Because there’s shit loads of text. And over 100MB of images, which are part of the build. And then there’s a remote storage with gigabytes of documents.
Even if I double the code base by copy pasting it will be a drop in a bucket.
Bjornir@programming.dev 4 months ago
I have a VPS that uses 1GB of RAM, it has 6-7 apps running in docker containers which isn’t the most ram efficient method of running apps.
A light OS really helps, plus the most used app that uses a lot of RAM actually reduce their consumption if needed, but use more when memory is free, the web browser. On one computer I have chrome running with some hundreds of MB used, instead of the usual GBs because RAM is running out.
So it appears that memory is full,but you can actually have a bit more memory available that is “hidden”
derpgon@programming.dev 4 months ago
Same here. When idle, the apps basically consume nothing. If they are just a webserver that calls to some PHP script, it basically takes no RAM at all when idle, and some RAM when actually used.
Websites and phone apps are such an unoptimized pieces if garbage that they are the sole reason for high RAM requirements. Also lots of background bloatware.
Specal@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This is resource reservation, it happens at an OS level. If chrome is using what appears to be alot of ram, it will be freed up once either the OS or another application requires it.
It just exists so that an application knows that if it needs that resource it can use X amount for now.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Absolutely.
Bad, rushed software that wires together 200 different giant libraries just to use a fraction of them and then run it in a sandboxed container with three daemons it needs for some reason doesn’t mean “8 Gb isn’t enough”, it means write tighter, better software.
AnxiousOtter@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That ship has long sailed unfortunately. The industry gave up on optimization in favour of praying that hardware advancements can keep up with the bloat.
stoly@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You just have to watch your favorite tablet get slower year after year to understand that a lot of this is artificial. They could make applications that don’t need those resources but would never do so.
Aux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You can always switch to a text based terminal and free up your memory. Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.
strange, mpv handles it just fine
Aux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
MPV doesn’t work in terminal (well, technically it does, but what’s the point of 4K HDR video in ASCII mode?). Please don’t confuse terminal emulator in GUI mode with a real text mode terminal.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Point it that it doesn’t need a browser full of bloated js garbage.
uis@lemm.ee 4 months ago
KMSDRM is in terminal enough for me. Fbcon too.
jas0n@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Guy from '95: “I bet it’s lightning fast though…”
No dude. It peaks pretty soon. In my time, Microsoft is touring a chat program that starts in under 10 seconds. And they’re genuinely proud of it.
uis@lemm.ee 4 months ago
And latency is more shit that it ever was
Shadywack@lemmy.world 4 months ago
We measure success by how many GB’s we have consumed when the only keys depressed from power on to desktop is our password. This shit right here is the real issue.
qqq@programming.dev 4 months ago
I once went for lower CAS timing 2x 128MB ram sticks (256 MB) instead of 2x 256s with slower speeds because I thought 512MB was insane overkill. Realized how wrong I was when trying to play Star Wars galaxies mmorpg when a lot of people were on the screen it started swapping to disk. Look up the specs for an IBM Aptiva, first computer my parents bought, and you’ll understand how 512MB can seem like a lot.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I still can’t fully accept that 1GB is not normal, 2GB is not very good, and 4GB is not all you ever gonna need.
If only it got bloated for some good reasons.
Aux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
High quality content is the reason. Sit in a terminal and your memory usage will be low.
lastweakness@lemmy.world 4 months ago
So we’re just going to ignore stuff like Electron, unoptimized assets, etc… Basically every other known problem… Yeah let’s just ignore all that
Aux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Is Electron that bad? Really? I have Slack open right now with two servers and it takes around 350MB of RAM. Not that bad, considering that every other colleague thinks that posting dumb shit GIFs into work chats is cool. That’s definitely nowhere close to Firefox, Chrome and WebStorm eating multiple gigs each.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
256MB or 512MB was fine for high-quality content in 2002, what was that then.
Suppose the amount of pixels and everything quadrupled - OK, then 2GB it is.
But 4GB being not enough? Do you realize what 4GB is?
lastweakness@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They didn’t just quadruple. They’re orders of magnitude higher these days. So content is a real thing.
But that’s not what’s actually being discussed here, memory usage these days is much more of a problem caused by bad practices rather than just content.
Aux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
One frame for a 4K monitor takes 33MB of memory. You need three of them for triple buffering used back in 2002, so half of your 256MB went to simply displaying a bloody UI. But there’s more! Today we’re using viewport composition, so the more apps you run, the more memory you need just to display the UI. Now this is what OS will use to render the final result, but your app will use additional memory for high res icons, fonts, photos, videos, etc. 4GB today is nothing.
I can tell you an anecdote. My partner was making a set of photo collages, about 7 art works to be printed in large format (think 5m+ per side). So 7 photo collages with source material saved on an external drive took 500 gigs. Tell me more about 256MB, lol.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 months ago
I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM.
It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
The moment you use a file that is bigger than 1GB, that computer will explode.
Some of us do more than just browse Lemmy.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Wow. Have you ever considered how people were working with files bigger than total RAM they had in the normal days of computing?
So in your opinion if you have 2GB+ of a log file, editing it you should have 2GB RAM occupied?
I just have no words, the ignorance.