Comment on Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough
Aux@lemmy.world 3 months agoFirst of all, 350MB is a drop in a bucket. But what’s more important is performance, because it affects things like power consumption, carbon emissions, etc. I’d rather see Slack “eating” one gig of RAM and running smoothly on a single E core below boost clocks with pretty much zero CPU use. That’s the whole point of having fast memory - so you can cache and pre-render as much as possible and leave it rest statically in memory.
First of all, 350MB is a drop in a bucket
People don’t run just a single app in their machines. If we triple ram usage of several apps, it results in a massive increase. That’s how bloat happens, it’s a cumulative increase on everything. If we analyze single cases, we could say that they’re not that bad individually, but the end result is the necessity for a constant and fast increase in hardware resources.
People don’t run just a single app in their machines
That’s not bloat, that’s people running more apps than ever.
the end result is the necessity for a constant and fast increase in hardware resources.
That’s not true. 8 to 16GB RAM machines became common in early 2010-s and barely anyone is using 32 gigs today. Even if we look at the most recent Steam Hardware & Software Survey, we will see that even gamers are pretty much stuck with 16 gigs. 32 gigs are installed on less than 30% of machines and more than that is barely 4%. Ten years ago 8 gigs was the most common option with 12+ gigs (Steam didn’t have 16gig category in 2014) being the third option. The switch to 16 gigs being number one happened in December 2019, so we’re five years in with 16 gigs being the most common option and more RAM is not getting anywhere close to replacing it (47.08% for 16 gigs and 28.72% for 32 gigs as of May 2024).
Now if you look at late 90-s and 2000-s you will see that RAM was doubling pretty much every 2-3 years. We can look at Steam data once again. Back in 2008 (that’s the earliest data available on archive.org) 2 gigs were the most common option. Next year 3 gigs option got very close and sat at 2nd place. In 2010 2GB, 3GB and 4GB were splitting hairs. 4GB option became the most common in 2011 with 3GB variant being very close 2nd place. 5GB option became the king in 2012. And the very next year 8 gigs became the norm.
So, 2 gigs in 2008, 4 gigs in 2011 and 8 gigs in 2013. You can check historical data yourself here web.archive.org/web/20130915000000*/…/hwsurvey/
That’s not bloat, that’s people running more apps than ever.
Not necessarily. People used to write text documents while looking for references on the internet, listening to music and chatting with friends at the same time in 2010, and even earlier, but the same use case (office suite+browser+music payer+chat app) takes much more resources today, with just a small increase in usability and features.
Bloat is a complicated thing to discuss, because there’s no hard definition of it, and each person will think about it in a different way, so what someone can consider bloat, someone else may not, and we end up talking about different things. You’re right that hardware resources have been increasing in a slower rate, and it may force some more optimizations, but a lot of software are still getting heavier, without bringing new functionalities.
The software is getting heavier because content, not code. Again, we can look at the games. Take some old games like GTA V or Skyrim, they will fly on modern high end machines! Now add mods with 8K textures, higher definition models, HDR support, etc and these old games will bend over your RTX4090.
Just wanted to point out that the number 1 performance blocker in the CPU is memory. In the general case, if you’re wasting memory, you’re wasting CPU.
No, that’s the other way round. You either have high CPU load and low memory, or low CPU load and high memory.
I’m not sure what metric you’re using to determine this. The bottom line is, if you’re trying to get the CPU to really fly, using memory efficiently is just as important (if not more) than the actual instructions you send to it. The reason for this is the high latency required to go out to external memory. This is performance 101.
When (according to about:unloads) my average firefox tab is 70-230MB depending on what it is and how old the tab is (youtube tabs for example bloat up the longer they are open), a chat app using over 350 is a pretty big deal
Telegram is using only 66 megs here. Again - it’s about content.
Well that other guy said it’s only 66megs so, you’re wrong.
/s
lastweakness@lemmy.world 3 months ago
CPU usage is famously terrible with Electron, which i also pointed out in the comment you’re replying to. But yes, having multiple chromium instances running for each “app” is terrible
Aux@lemmy.world 3 months ago
No, it’s not.
lastweakness@lemmy.world 3 months ago
… Okay?
AnxiousOtter@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Great rebuttal. Really got him with this one.
Aux@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Do you really want me to go into the details of how JIT works in V8 and which Electron APIs allow the apps to idle correctly?
Shadywack@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yes it is.
“iT’S oNLy a FeW hUnDrED MB oF LiBRAriES and BiNAriES pEr aPp, iT’S oNLy dOuBLe oR tRiPLe tHe RAM, DiSk, anD cpU uSAgE”
Then we have the fucking shit show of 6-8GB of RAM used just by booting the fucking machine. Chromium/Webkit is practically an OS by itself for all the I/O, media handling, and built in libraries upon libraries of shit. Let’s run that whole entire stack for all these electron apps, and then fragment each one independent of each other (hello Discord, who used Electron 12 for WAY too long) then say “bUt iT’s pORtaBLe!”.
Yes, it isn’t just terrible, it’s fucking obnoxiously and horrendously terrible, like we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory terrible, and moronically insipid. Optimization in the fucking trash can and a fire hydrant in all our fucking assholes, terrible. That’s HOW terrible it actually is, so you’re wrong.
Aux@lemmy.world 3 months ago
RAM usage doesn’t matter in the slightest.