5 ms·

Whenever I think, "Thank goodness the limited memory days are behind us", it pops up again and again. Sure, you can buy a new iMac Pro with 128GB of RAM(!!) and

Whenever I think, "Thank goodness the limited memory days are behind us", it pops up again and again. Sure, you can buy a new iMac Pro with 128GB of RAM(!!) and smartphones regularly have 8GB available, but the increasingly popular IOT devices and smart consumer hardware (like streaming media boxes, etc.) try to limit the BOM cost and thus limit memory as much as possible. Tiny memory leaks become an issue, or random crashes from wonky media codec implementations, etc. I think the skills (and hacks) that used to be useful only to game developers and OEMs are now going to be needed by a much wider audience of devs.

gizmo686 9y ago
To add on to this, I am currently working on a project where the only source of persistent storage is [0], which offers 64B of general purpose SRAM. It is a $0.70 low power clock with built in support for battery backup. Our main processor has more memory, but that goes away when we loose main power. Still, 64B should be enough for everyone. [0] http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/268/20005010F-737592.pdf http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/268/20005010F-737592.pdf
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  I love tiny things like that, there's already so much you can do with it. I wrote a thing way back when, probably a TI chip or something, which had like 300ish? bytes of memory. It got commands from a serial in (which was a bluetooth device, commands were sent from a java application on a laptop), the commands were a simple self-made thing which was a command (two numbers) and an argument (like, "set speed to 10"). That then controlled a PWM for the engine and things like that. RC boat with a few hundred bytes of memory. I'm reinventing all that now with using raspberry pi's and arduinos and such. I just got an EPC32, which is a $5 device that should have wifi and bluetooth and such built in already.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Whenever I think, "Thank goodness the limited memory days are behind us", it pops up again and again. Sure, you can buy a new iMac Pro with 128GB of RAM(!!) and smartphones regularly have 8GB available I think you're underestimating the accretion of software bloat. You remember the days when you did exactly the same things, exactly as fast, with 1GB machines? 512MB machines? As long as devs don't give a fuck (er, they make "professional decision" of optimizing dev time (over product quality)), the days of limited memory are not going to be behind us.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I always think about Windows Vista when I hear "unlimited memory". Somebody looked at expanding memory and processing, and decided "let's have an animated 3D background for the OS, that'll be good". Memory is always going to be pushed to its limits unless devs and users alike go out of their way to keep it intact.
  - jooke 9y ago
    What's the point of having more memory if not for new features?
    - lostgame 9y ago
      In an Operating System, that ‘more memory’ could be used for applications instead of bloat.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      In general, nothing. For example, Chrome eats pretty much all free memory keeping tabs loaded, but surrenders it gracefully when needed. That's a great use of memory. But for an OS, and specifically for a feature that doesn't devolve unless the user goes and manually changes it, it's obnoxious. The OS is inherently a support layer for the things the user opens by choice; I'd argue any expansion of its resource footprint ought to have a clear justification.
  - hoosieree 9y ago
    Sorry, I don't trust myself or you to exercise restraint. The ONLY thing that keeps memory usage in check is physics.
- FRex 9y ago
  It feels like that dev time cost is instead being crowdfunded by energy, disk, CPU and RAM that every user has to pay with and eventually that cost is paid by Earth itself. An app might be cheap or free but in the long time cheaper for the planet and each user would be an app costing a dollar or two more per install. I was using a 2011 laptop with only an HDD, 2 gigs of RAM and no discrete GPU until it actually went and finally broke last year so it irks me especially when I see this handwaving of "computers are cheap", especially from Westerner millenials or developers from SF. The fact that well off people who change machines every few years can even dare to call less well off people with older and shittier hardware "entitled" for wanting performant snappy software just like they got 5-10 years ago when they bought their machine is baffling. Not everyone needs a crazy and new machine, writers, reviewers, sales people, admins, etc. Case in point - G.R.R. Martin uses a DOS machine to write - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg . I.e. Slack and Atom got absolutely lambasted for performance, sluggishness and resource use (while VS Code was applauded, so it's clearly not an Electron specific thing) despite being made by companies valued in billions and based in the most expensive region of the world, one of them even being a paid product. Or a game with pixel art (I do like it and I understand that particular indie dev optimizing for time with such a niche product so I don't want to name names here) graphic and gameplay only as deep as some better Flash ones from mid 2000s requires as its minimal system requirements several GBs of RAM (for comparison, Doom 3 recommended, not even minimal, was 512 MB in 2003) and disk space, etc. Or when a graphically simple 2D game requires a 64 bit OS (despite using no 64 bit features seemingly), a non-integrated GPU (and not because of some lack of OpenGL features but due to poor optimization) and runs at 30 FPS on an integrated Intel that has 0 problems with Mincraft with really far draw distance. And it attempts to load hundreds of files (all of the game assets for an entire 4-10 hour long VN) at boot, taking 30 seconds on an HDD. And they could be loaded incrementally (loading what is needed right now only and everything else in the background, even dumbly and fully into RAM as it does now) or packed into SQLite or a ZIP to avoid so much FS access, but no - hundreds of files are being opened at game boot and there are tons of XML assets with 0 compression or minization. But instead the solution to performance woes (in gaming especially but through things like Electron it's seeping into main stream) is apparently to "git gud", "stop being a poor pleb" and getting a new GPU (apparently GTX 950 M is a potato level GPU now and only an idiot would play games on it in 2017) or an SSD so that the developer doesn't have to bother to do the tiniest of optimization. That 2D game loading all assets, wanting a 64 bit CPU and non-integrated GPU, all for no good reasons, was Tokyo Dark by the way and due to the way the developer carry themselves I have 0 problem name dropping them, I made an entire video about that game, the disk and GPU part is at 15:15 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCXwgPJGLIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCXwgPJGLIE It feels like what was done with Crash Bandicoot is some interstellar death star level technology in comparison to what some developers do, not even bothering to pack files to reduce FS chatter or load smartly or compress textual assets, they probably had it developed on an SSD, it loaded fast enough for them, it's done and prime for shipping, duh! Just gotta write a hype text about how extensively we tested it and how much effort we put in making it! I realize I sound like an ass that's ranting and I am writing too lengthy (I did think about writing articles instead of lengthy HN comments like this one so if someone is interested feel free in hitting me up) but some of the stuff just blows my mind in ways I didn't know existed. It's not even optimization for dev time like Python could feasibly be but sometimes outright waste or lack of basic care, i.e. Slack was apparently launching a full blown browser per organization until recently (or something like that), completely needlessly, now that part is out. At the same time they had this crazy involved (and cute, because it's 2017 and things must be cute) error page: https://slack.com/asdsad https://slack.com/asdsad , or that semi-notorious reply article from a guy using unix CLI instead of hip BigData(tm) tools to analyze relatively small amount of data (yes, the guy is rubbing it a bit in too badly when he brings out mawk): https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-th... That lack of care is evident in other areas too, i.e. in security it manifests as these SQL injections, IoT botnets, outdated software pwns and plaintext/unsalted+sha1 password debacles. Afterwards it gets justified by "state attack, China or Russia probably" or handwaved like "we store passwords in plaintext to send them to user via email when he forgets them" (an actual explanation I read once..) or "we innovated so fast to deliver SUPERB customer experience that we didn't focus on security" (while 'security' in that case would amount to closing an admin port on an IoT appliance for example..). In general software we get also stuff like that TP-Link repeater (recently on HN) that needlessly queries NTP every 5 seconds, squandering hundreds of megs of transfer per month and basically DDoSing these NTP servers. It's like this entire mentality that good stuff is too hard or too complicated or too expensive to do (like that Chess guy and his "clever multi-threaded application") while Pareto is very much in effect and even as little as not opening a hundred files at once at game boot or reading the dense man/info pages and thinking for 20 minutes about the problem at hand or back of the napkin math could make a big difference. 10 or 20 minutes or hours of dev time per year is not a big enough reason to squander resources so badly. There is an expression in Polish that seems really apt for developers who "optimize" their time to that degree: korona ci z głowy nie spadnie (the crown won't fall off your head, basically meaning something along the lines that exerting a little effort towards something isn't too much to be reasonably asked/expected of you). I recall a similar event when someone wanted to stress test something on a webserver and had a few million long file with URLs in it, he did while read line curl $line in bash, it brought his local machine to its knees, probably due to this rapid process creation and destruction. I gave him an xargs with -P and -n to launch a single curl per each 100 URLs instead and it ran no problem and this time the webserver we were testing was on its knees on my much weaker laptop (weakest in the company actually, since I wasn't a programmer and didn't need a strong one), as intended. I'm actually guilty of overengineering myself, since my first try was a Python 3 + requests + grequests script, and only when weeks after I forgot where I put the script and didn't want to rewrite it I ran that xargs version (very Taco Bell eqsue solution actually - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10829512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10829512 ).. And that's an anecdote but it feels like people (actual 'professionals' making a paid product and working in $billion+ corps) ship stuff as bad as the original 1 curl per URL script as if it's not a big deal and then it gets justified with some handwaving, "focus on features and not performance and security", "no one is gonna hack a toaster for anything", "computers are fast and cheap", "optimizing for dev time", etc. It's a typical high volume low margin situation, like Steve Jobs once said during original Mac building that improving a load time by even a few seconds saves lives of people because so many people will use the Mac so often that it will add to a few lifetimes.
Tobba_ 9y ago
You'll still get an increase in the number of things you can have loaded into RAM at once that's proportional to the reduction. That'll give you far more leeway in when trying to load resources on the fly, which most games still struggle with. So reducing memory usage is definitely something you want to do regardless of how much you have. Also, if it's a PC game, you're looking at memory limits far below what the HW may offer - at least if you want it to run without annoyances. Windows limits the amount of memory it'll allow to be committed to the DRAM size + (current) pagefile size (may only be 4-8GB on SSDs); note how that doesn't include GPU memory - and allocating that counts as commit due to how residency works. Then you're looking at the OS eating 2-3GB of that, plus 1+GB if the user has a browser opened, plus anything slowly leaking memory. And a LOT of recent Windows applications leak memory or actually use insane amounts (including, amazingly, a built-in service on Win10) - if they never access it again it'll eventually get evicted from the working set, which means it only counts towards committed memory; task manager doesn't display per-process committed memory by default. That's only a fraction of all the problems.
leeter 9y ago
I still use things like struct packing on a regular basis to reduce bloat. Just because systems have absurd amounts of ram doesn't mean that Chrome won't gobble all of it. If I can get my application's memory down to just a few pages (4k chunks on x86) then I'm much easier to page in after they switch back from Chrome. I don't have hard targets but I do still make an effort here because it's worth it not to get bugs about my applications being slow because of other bad actors.

gizmo686 9y ago

To add on to this, I am currently working on a project where the only source of persistent storage is [0], which offers 64B of general purpose SRAM. It is a $0.70 low power clock with built in support for battery backup. Our main processor has more memory, but that goes away when we loose main power. Still, 64B should be enough for everyone. [0] http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/268/20005010F-737592.pdf http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/268/20005010F-737592.pdf

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I love tiny things like that, there's already so much you can do with it. I wrote a thing way back when, probably a TI chip or something, which had like 300ish? bytes of memory. It got commands from a serial in (which was a bluetooth device, commands were sent from a java application on a laptop), the commands were a simple self-made thing which was a command (two numbers) and an argument (like, "set speed to 10"). That then controlled a PWM for the engine and things like that. RC boat with a few hundred bytes of memory. I'm reinventing all that now with using raspberry pi's and arduinos and such. I just got an EPC32, which is a $5 device that should have wifi and bluetooth and such built in already.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> Whenever I think, "Thank goodness the limited memory days are behind us", it pops up again and again. Sure, you can buy a new iMac Pro with 128GB of RAM(!!) and smartphones regularly have 8GB available I think you're underestimating the accretion of software bloat. You remember the days when you did exactly the same things, exactly as fast, with 1GB machines? 512MB machines? As long as devs don't give a fuck (er, they make "professional decision" of optimizing dev time (over product quality)), the days of limited memory are not going to be behind us.

Bartweiss 9y ago
I always think about Windows Vista when I hear "unlimited memory". Somebody looked at expanding memory and processing, and decided "let's have an animated 3D background for the OS, that'll be good". Memory is always going to be pushed to its limits unless devs and users alike go out of their way to keep it intact.
- jooke 9y ago
  What's the point of having more memory if not for new features?
  - lostgame 9y ago
    In an Operating System, that ‘more memory’ could be used for applications instead of bloat.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    In general, nothing. For example, Chrome eats pretty much all free memory keeping tabs loaded, but surrenders it gracefully when needed. That's a great use of memory. But for an OS, and specifically for a feature that doesn't devolve unless the user goes and manually changes it, it's obnoxious. The OS is inherently a support layer for the things the user opens by choice; I'd argue any expansion of its resource footprint ought to have a clear justification.
- hoosieree 9y ago
  Sorry, I don't trust myself or you to exercise restraint. The ONLY thing that keeps memory usage in check is physics.
FRex 9y ago
It feels like that dev time cost is instead being crowdfunded by energy, disk, CPU and RAM that every user has to pay with and eventually that cost is paid by Earth itself. An app might be cheap or free but in the long time cheaper for the planet and each user would be an app costing a dollar or two more per install. I was using a 2011 laptop with only an HDD, 2 gigs of RAM and no discrete GPU until it actually went and finally broke last year so it irks me especially when I see this handwaving of "computers are cheap", especially from Westerner millenials or developers from SF. The fact that well off people who change machines every few years can even dare to call less well off people with older and shittier hardware "entitled" for wanting performant snappy software just like they got 5-10 years ago when they bought their machine is baffling. Not everyone needs a crazy and new machine, writers, reviewers, sales people, admins, etc. Case in point - G.R.R. Martin uses a DOS machine to write - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg . I.e. Slack and Atom got absolutely lambasted for performance, sluggishness and resource use (while VS Code was applauded, so it's clearly not an Electron specific thing) despite being made by companies valued in billions and based in the most expensive region of the world, one of them even being a paid product. Or a game with pixel art (I do like it and I understand that particular indie dev optimizing for time with such a niche product so I don't want to name names here) graphic and gameplay only as deep as some better Flash ones from mid 2000s requires as its minimal system requirements several GBs of RAM (for comparison, Doom 3 recommended, not even minimal, was 512 MB in 2003) and disk space, etc. Or when a graphically simple 2D game requires a 64 bit OS (despite using no 64 bit features seemingly), a non-integrated GPU (and not because of some lack of OpenGL features but due to poor optimization) and runs at 30 FPS on an integrated Intel that has 0 problems with Mincraft with really far draw distance. And it attempts to load hundreds of files (all of the game assets for an entire 4-10 hour long VN) at boot, taking 30 seconds on an HDD. And they could be loaded incrementally (loading what is needed right now only and everything else in the background, even dumbly and fully into RAM as it does now) or packed into SQLite or a ZIP to avoid so much FS access, but no - hundreds of files are being opened at game boot and there are tons of XML assets with 0 compression or minization. But instead the solution to performance woes (in gaming especially but through things like Electron it's seeping into main stream) is apparently to "git gud", "stop being a poor pleb" and getting a new GPU (apparently GTX 950 M is a potato level GPU now and only an idiot would play games on it in 2017) or an SSD so that the developer doesn't have to bother to do the tiniest of optimization. That 2D game loading all assets, wanting a 64 bit CPU and non-integrated GPU, all for no good reasons, was Tokyo Dark by the way and due to the way the developer carry themselves I have 0 problem name dropping them, I made an entire video about that game, the disk and GPU part is at 15:15 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCXwgPJGLIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCXwgPJGLIE It feels like what was done with Crash Bandicoot is some interstellar death star level technology in comparison to what some developers do, not even bothering to pack files to reduce FS chatter or load smartly or compress textual assets, they probably had it developed on an SSD, it loaded fast enough for them, it's done and prime for shipping, duh! Just gotta write a hype text about how extensively we tested it and how much effort we put in making it! I realize I sound like an ass that's ranting and I am writing too lengthy (I did think about writing articles instead of lengthy HN comments like this one so if someone is interested feel free in hitting me up) but some of the stuff just blows my mind in ways I didn't know existed. It's not even optimization for dev time like Python could feasibly be but sometimes outright waste or lack of basic care, i.e. Slack was apparently launching a full blown browser per organization until recently (or something like that), completely needlessly, now that part is out. At the same time they had this crazy involved (and cute, because it's 2017 and things must be cute) error page: https://slack.com/asdsad https://slack.com/asdsad , or that semi-notorious reply article from a guy using unix CLI instead of hip BigData(tm) tools to analyze relatively small amount of data (yes, the guy is rubbing it a bit in too badly when he brings out mawk): https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-th... That lack of care is evident in other areas too, i.e. in security it manifests as these SQL injections, IoT botnets, outdated software pwns and plaintext/unsalted+sha1 password debacles. Afterwards it gets justified by "state attack, China or Russia probably" or handwaved like "we store passwords in plaintext to send them to user via email when he forgets them" (an actual explanation I read once..) or "we innovated so fast to deliver SUPERB customer experience that we didn't focus on security" (while 'security' in that case would amount to closing an admin port on an IoT appliance for example..). In general software we get also stuff like that TP-Link repeater (recently on HN) that needlessly queries NTP every 5 seconds, squandering hundreds of megs of transfer per month and basically DDoSing these NTP servers. It's like this entire mentality that good stuff is too hard or too complicated or too expensive to do (like that Chess guy and his "clever multi-threaded application") while Pareto is very much in effect and even as little as not opening a hundred files at once at game boot or reading the dense man/info pages and thinking for 20 minutes about the problem at hand or back of the napkin math could make a big difference. 10 or 20 minutes or hours of dev time per year is not a big enough reason to squander resources so badly. There is an expression in Polish that seems really apt for developers who "optimize" their time to that degree: korona ci z głowy nie spadnie (the crown won't fall off your head, basically meaning something along the lines that exerting a little effort towards something isn't too much to be reasonably asked/expected of you). I recall a similar event when someone wanted to stress test something on a webserver and had a few million long file with URLs in it, he did while read line curl $line in bash, it brought his local machine to its knees, probably due to this rapid process creation and destruction. I gave him an xargs with -P and -n to launch a single curl per each 100 URLs instead and it ran no problem and this time the webserver we were testing was on its knees on my much weaker laptop (weakest in the company actually, since I wasn't a programmer and didn't need a strong one), as intended. I'm actually guilty of overengineering myself, since my first try was a Python 3 + requests + grequests script, and only when weeks after I forgot where I put the script and didn't want to rewrite it I ran that xargs version (very Taco Bell eqsue solution actually - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10829512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10829512 ).. And that's an anecdote but it feels like people (actual 'professionals' making a paid product and working in $billion+ corps) ship stuff as bad as the original 1 curl per URL script as if it's not a big deal and then it gets justified with some handwaving, "focus on features and not performance and security", "no one is gonna hack a toaster for anything", "computers are fast and cheap", "optimizing for dev time", etc. It's a typical high volume low margin situation, like Steve Jobs once said during original Mac building that improving a load time by even a few seconds saves lives of people because so many people will use the Mac so often that it will add to a few lifetimes.

Tobba_ 9y ago

You'll still get an increase in the number of things you can have loaded into RAM at once that's proportional to the reduction. That'll give you far more leeway in when trying to load resources on the fly, which most games still struggle with. So reducing memory usage is definitely something you want to do regardless of how much you have. Also, if it's a PC game, you're looking at memory limits far below what the HW may offer - at least if you want it to run without annoyances. Windows limits the amount of memory it'll allow to be committed to the DRAM size + (current) pagefile size (may only be 4-8GB on SSDs); note how that doesn't include GPU memory - and allocating that counts as commit due to how residency works. Then you're looking at the OS eating 2-3GB of that, plus 1+GB if the user has a browser opened, plus anything slowly leaking memory. And a LOT of recent Windows applications leak memory or actually use insane amounts (including, amazingly, a built-in service on Win10) - if they never access it again it'll eventually get evicted from the working set, which means it only counts towards committed memory; task manager doesn't display per-process committed memory by default. That's only a fraction of all the problems.

leeter 9y ago

I still use things like struct packing on a regular basis to reduce bloat. Just because systems have absurd amounts of ram doesn't mean that Chrome won't gobble all of it. If I can get my application's memory down to just a few pages (4k chunks on x86) then I'm much easier to page in after they switch back from Chrome. I don't have hard targets but I do still make an effort here because it's worth it not to get bugs about my applications being slow because of other bad actors.