10 ms·

I keep adding RAM and i keep running into 95%+ usage. Main consumer: Chrome, just with a few dozen tabs open. Followed by Android Studio (3GB for a medium proj

I keep adding RAM and i keep running into 95%+ usage. Main consumer: Chrome, just with a few dozen tabs open. Followed by Android Studio (3GB for a medium project), IntelliJ idea (another 3GB for a smallish project + 15% cpu constantly) If prices keep going down i'll just put 128GB and call it a day. Slack takes more than half a Gig with only 5 teams. It's a chat app, what the F?

dekhn 8y ago
are you complaining about cache data that makes the system run faster? I would expect any system that manages cache data to fill most of your RAM.
- gruez 8y ago
  Most task/activity monitors don't consider OS cache memory as "used".
  - dekhn 8y ago
    I'm not sure exactly what you are saying, but what I am saying is that Chrome and other applications use either their own, or OS mechanisms, to cache read pages. This is visible on all systems I work with (mac, win, linux), either attributed to the process, or to OS read cache.
    - gruez 8y ago
      >I would expect any system that manages cache data to fill most of your RAM. >I'm not sure exactly what you are saying > This is visible on all systems I work with (mac, win, linux), either attributed to the process, or to OS read cache. My response was directed at your part of the comment: >I would expect any system that manages cache data to fill most of your RAM. All systems do that, but they don't look "used" (eg. on the windows memory graph, the dark region excludes os cached memory). Unless using free[1], no reasonable person would think 99% of their ram's being used. [1] https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
      - dekhn 8y ago
        I use free. Pretty much everybody I know who uses unix knows this. However, more importantly, you can't really show per-process cached ram and sum it up properly (since multiple processes can cache the same disk reads). Not really an issue in Chrome, which manages its own RAM cache (and is the system I was referring to here).
smacktoward 8y ago
If you have the RAM, wouldn't you rather the software use it? Is there some benefit to having memory sitting around empty and idle? As long as the software doesn't require all that memory, but can work OK with less and then scale up to use more if you've got it, I guess I don't see what the problem is.
- ip26 8y ago
  Does it gracefully & rapidly clean house if another app needs some? Does the extra usage benefit you in any way at all, to make up for the disk cache it gets used as otherwise?
- est31 8y ago
  > Is there some benefit to having memory sitting around empty and idle? Yes, modern operating systems use free RAM as cache for the HDD. If you have an I/O intensive process, having a large amount of RAM is really helpful.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  How often do your computer exclusively runs Chrome? How easily can the OS take the memory back from Chrome to run something else (that one is easy, it can not, except on the last case scenario where it kills process).
  - 781 8y ago
    > How easily can the OS take the memory back from Chrome to run something else (that one is easy, it can not, except on the last case scenario where it kills process). It actually can. It's called swapping. An amazing technology from the 90s.
    - Jach 8y ago
      That's not what GP meant, the analogous situation is loading GBs of data into a database, resulting in a GBs sized file on disk. If you truncate the data, it's gone, but the database won't actually shrink the file on disk unless you vacuum too. Chrome might not be using all the memory it has claimed, but it's not necessarily releasing all that it can back to the system either.
sydney6 8y ago
Unused memory is wasted memory, they say.
- rat9988 8y ago
  Yeah, software takes more ram, so when your ram is full your computer is slowed (because it probably doesn't need only 100% if your ram), therefore you buy more ram. Now guess what? your ram is not at 100% anymore, your unused memory is wasted anyway, so why not use it? Repeat the cycle.
  - 12298765 8y ago
    Not exactly -- more like no matter how much RAM you have, it makes sense for your software to use it all rather than disk. It means that however much you have, your system should use as much of it as possible. Otherwise it's just sitting there doing nothing. Contrary to popular belief, the more RAM you're using, the faster your system will be (assuming it's using the RAM efficiently)
    - imtringued 8y ago
      >Contrary to popular belief, the more RAM you're using, the faster your system will be (assuming it's using the RAM efficiently) Is this a joke? If I have 16GB of RAM but my programs use 18GB then my system will suddenly become faster?
- ungzd 8y ago
  Free memory is always used by disk cache.
  - effie 8y ago
    On Linux, not all of it, in my experience. If you have a lot of memory, some of it may be completely free.
    - bradknowles 8y ago
1996 8y ago
You named your own problem: you are using google technologies (chrome, android, java) Use more sensible tools and you will not waste as much ram (firefox, visual studio code, .net) Edit: Numberwang, apparently your account is dead so I can't reply anywhere but here. Edge is great. I can't complain about its memory usage. Unfortunately with Microsoft moving to chrome engine, I am taking the precautionary measure of moving to Firefox until they have shown they can make Chrome suck less. Firefox is not as good as Edge for my needs, but quite close.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Numberwang 8y ago
  FireFox is not an option. It is an order of magniturd slower than Chrome. Does anyone know anything about the memory usage of Edge?
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    You might want to try updating Firefox if you think it's an order of magnitude slower.
  - copperx 8y ago
    It's 2019 now. Try Firefox again. For me it feels faster than Chrome. And it has a reader view. That's on Linux and on Windows. On Mac, I admit, Chrome feels faster. But you have Safari.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      Firefox's speed depends a lot on which extensions you use. I use a bunch, like uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Tridactyl, Tree Style Tab, and Stylus, and Firefox slows down to a crawl for me when I have more than about 8 tabs open. Now, some might advise not to use extensions, but using extensions is half the reason that I use Firefox at all in the first place, as Firefox without extensions really sucks.
spullara 8y ago
You can change the startup parameters of IntelliJ to reduce the maximum memory usage. If you don't it will optimize for least GC time rather than least memory usage and maximum usage will be 75% of total memory.
- the8472 8y ago
  With java 12 you'll be able to tweak G1 to minimize footprint without setting an arbitrary maximum. https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/346 https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/346
  - spullara 8y ago
    I bet ZGC would also be pretty great for this use case as it is super conservative.
ktpsns 8y ago
A concept a High Performance Computing professor told me once: A program which is memory intensive must be slower then one which needs little memory -- just because load/write operations from the CPU take time. That's one of the reasons why some bloated contemporary desktop software (i.e. Slack) feels as fast as its historic counterpart did in 1995 (i.e. our MSN/ICQ clients back in these days).
- fwip 8y ago
  That's a nice sound bite, but isn't really true. There are many cases where we increase memory usage for faster software. Side note, lessons from HPC aren't really that applicable for chat programs.
  - inetknght 8y ago
    Faster, or perhaps more features.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    Conversely cache misses are painful and largely haven't gotten faster over the years.
    - mbreese 8y ago
      Exactly. And the reason why programs that use a lot of memory might feel slower than one with a little is that cache miss rate. Adding memory often makes an entire system faster (again, because you can cache things in the faster RAM rather than paging out to disk). But for two comparable programs, I could see the argument that the lower-memory footprint program would be faster. (For comparable programs).
      - vvanders 8y ago
        Yup, as DDR clock speed increased so have CAS timings.
      - fwip 8y ago
Dunedan 8y ago
The past couple of days I took a deeper look into the RAM usage of Android Studio as I had my fair share of problems with it. I'm not sure what the 3GB you mentioned include, but I made the following observations: - Android Studio itself: default heap size of 1280MB[1] plus ~400MB of metaspace - Gradle: That's the part which surprised me the most: - Most projects probably have a custom heap size set for Gradle. Turns out: If you're using Kotlin the same amount of heap size is also used for the Kotlin compile daemon. So if you configure -Xmx2G you'll end up with 2GB for the Gradle daemon and 2GB for the Kotlin compile daemon. The heap size for the Kotlin compile daemon can be separately configured by setting `-Dkotlin.daemon.jvm.options=-Xmx<xxx>`[2]. - Gradle 5.0 is way more memory efficient than the versions before and they even drastically lowered the default heap sizes[3]. - If you still have a custom heap size in your `dexOptions` set: that's not recommended anymore[4]. [1]: https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/studio-config https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/studio-config [2]: https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/solved-disable-kotlin-compiler-process-keepalive/2622 https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/solved-disable-kotlin-compi... [3]: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/6216 https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/6216 [4]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37230589/4779904 https://stackoverflow.com/a/37230589/4779904
agumonkey 8y ago
http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm I repeat http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
72deluxe 8y ago
Slack is running a chrome instance - look at it in detail using Sysinternal's Process Explorer. Skype now does the same. It's so grossly dumb - giant native applications running a hidden web browser to show a webpage that does it utmost to pretend to be a native application (but it doesn't work - Alt-F to launch the File menu in slack but cursor left/right doesn't take you to the next menu like REAL native apps do).... It's a future I do not wish to be involved with!
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  It's the like saying about how giving developers 2 weeks worth of work to do in a month's timeframe, and watch it take a month: give web developers unlimited memory and they will find a way to make their desktop applications eat all of it.
ken 8y ago
I'm occasionally tempted to add RAM, but every year my OS and applications get more memory-efficient so I have less of an excuse to spend any money on that. I've got 16GB and it's getting more sufficient all the time! The latest compiler upgrades make it twice as fast as last year, on the same hardware. Life is pretty good. (Avoiding hardware upgrades isn't all peaches and cream. My graphics cards are getting less acceptable all the time, and I'll probably need to upgrade this year.) I don't use Chrome or Slack or any of those others. The easiest way to use less memory is to not run programs which require a bunch of it. People who drive Ferraris don't complain about their fuel economy.
swiley 8y ago
I feel like there’s some cultural problem that google has which prevents them from writing decent end user software.
gumby 8y ago
> Main [RAM] consumer: Chrome, just with a few dozen tabs open....Slack takes more than half a Gig with only 5 teams. It's a chat app, what the F? Because it's an Electron app, i.e. another copy of Chrome. Actually for all the money they've raised I can't understand why the Slack apps are so terrible. I use Mac and iOS versions, and they still can't show useful activity badges; video doesn't work on ios...what are the spending their billions on?
- therealx 8y ago
  We've opened a lot of tickets about the " useful activity badges" but they seem to think it's a feature, not a bug. (I assume to keep remote devs happy so managers can't drill down to the minute of time.) I know for sure that their underlying tool fo determine away time is very accurate.
e12e 8y ago
I mostly get by with wee-slack in a terminal. No in-line image support... But that can also be a feature. https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
- mdorazio 8y ago
  I feel like I'm going crazy here. Wee-slack looks exactly like IRC did 20 years ago, except IRC was free. This is madness.
  - ants_a 8y ago
    Maybe if IRC people would have been able to evolve the system to add persistent history we wouldn't be where we are now. And no, sshing to a server to run irssi in screen is not, and never was, an acceptable answer.
    - syn0byte 8y ago
      Not until you wrap it in electron anyway. hacking up and rebranding an IRCd is a tried and true startup method. Napster, Slack, Discord...
dmead 8y ago
do you have a real reason you need to run chrome?

dekhn 8y ago

are you complaining about cache data that makes the system run faster? I would expect any system that manages cache data to fill most of your RAM.

gruez 8y ago
Most task/activity monitors don't consider OS cache memory as "used".
- dekhn 8y ago
  I'm not sure exactly what you are saying, but what I am saying is that Chrome and other applications use either their own, or OS mechanisms, to cache read pages. This is visible on all systems I work with (mac, win, linux), either attributed to the process, or to OS read cache.
  - gruez 8y ago
    >I would expect any system that manages cache data to fill most of your RAM. >I'm not sure exactly what you are saying > This is visible on all systems I work with (mac, win, linux), either attributed to the process, or to OS read cache. My response was directed at your part of the comment: >I would expect any system that manages cache data to fill most of your RAM. All systems do that, but they don't look "used" (eg. on the windows memory graph, the dark region excludes os cached memory). Unless using free[1], no reasonable person would think 99% of their ram's being used. [1] https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
    - dekhn 8y ago
      I use free. Pretty much everybody I know who uses unix knows this. However, more importantly, you can't really show per-process cached ram and sum it up properly (since multiple processes can cache the same disk reads). Not really an issue in Chrome, which manages its own RAM cache (and is the system I was referring to here).

smacktoward 8y ago

If you have the RAM, wouldn't you rather the software use it? Is there some benefit to having memory sitting around empty and idle? As long as the software doesn't require all that memory, but can work OK with less and then scale up to use more if you've got it, I guess I don't see what the problem is.

ip26 8y ago
Does it gracefully & rapidly clean house if another app needs some? Does the extra usage benefit you in any way at all, to make up for the disk cache it gets used as otherwise?
est31 8y ago
> Is there some benefit to having memory sitting around empty and idle? Yes, modern operating systems use free RAM as cache for the HDD. If you have an I/O intensive process, having a large amount of RAM is really helpful.
marcosdumay 8y ago
How often do your computer exclusively runs Chrome? How easily can the OS take the memory back from Chrome to run something else (that one is easy, it can not, except on the last case scenario where it kills process).
- 781 8y ago
  > How easily can the OS take the memory back from Chrome to run something else (that one is easy, it can not, except on the last case scenario where it kills process). It actually can. It's called swapping. An amazing technology from the 90s.
  - Jach 8y ago
    That's not what GP meant, the analogous situation is loading GBs of data into a database, resulting in a GBs sized file on disk. If you truncate the data, it's gone, but the database won't actually shrink the file on disk unless you vacuum too. Chrome might not be using all the memory it has claimed, but it's not necessarily releasing all that it can back to the system either.

sydney6 8y ago

Unused memory is wasted memory, they say.

rat9988 8y ago
Yeah, software takes more ram, so when your ram is full your computer is slowed (because it probably doesn't need only 100% if your ram), therefore you buy more ram. Now guess what? your ram is not at 100% anymore, your unused memory is wasted anyway, so why not use it? Repeat the cycle.
- 12298765 8y ago
  Not exactly -- more like no matter how much RAM you have, it makes sense for your software to use it all rather than disk. It means that however much you have, your system should use as much of it as possible. Otherwise it's just sitting there doing nothing. Contrary to popular belief, the more RAM you're using, the faster your system will be (assuming it's using the RAM efficiently)
  - imtringued 8y ago
    >Contrary to popular belief, the more RAM you're using, the faster your system will be (assuming it's using the RAM efficiently) Is this a joke? If I have 16GB of RAM but my programs use 18GB then my system will suddenly become faster?
ungzd 8y ago
Free memory is always used by disk cache.
- effie 8y ago
  On Linux, not all of it, in my experience. If you have a lot of memory, some of it may be completely free.
  - bradknowles 8y ago

1996 8y ago

You named your own problem: you are using google technologies (chrome, android, java) Use more sensible tools and you will not waste as much ram (firefox, visual studio code, .net) Edit: Numberwang, apparently your account is dead so I can't reply anywhere but here. Edge is great. I can't complain about its memory usage. Unfortunately with Microsoft moving to chrome engine, I am taking the precautionary measure of moving to Firefox until they have shown they can make Chrome suck less. Firefox is not as good as Edge for my needs, but quite close.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Numberwang 8y ago
FireFox is not an option. It is an order of magniturd slower than Chrome. Does anyone know anything about the memory usage of Edge?
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  You might want to try updating Firefox if you think it's an order of magnitude slower.
- copperx 8y ago
  It's 2019 now. Try Firefox again. For me it feels faster than Chrome. And it has a reader view. That's on Linux and on Windows. On Mac, I admit, Chrome feels faster. But you have Safari.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    Firefox's speed depends a lot on which extensions you use. I use a bunch, like uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Tridactyl, Tree Style Tab, and Stylus, and Firefox slows down to a crawl for me when I have more than about 8 tabs open. Now, some might advise not to use extensions, but using extensions is half the reason that I use Firefox at all in the first place, as Firefox without extensions really sucks.

spullara 8y ago

You can change the startup parameters of IntelliJ to reduce the maximum memory usage. If you don't it will optimize for least GC time rather than least memory usage and maximum usage will be 75% of total memory.

the8472 8y ago
With java 12 you'll be able to tweak G1 to minimize footprint without setting an arbitrary maximum. https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/346 https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/346
- spullara 8y ago
  I bet ZGC would also be pretty great for this use case as it is super conservative.

ktpsns 8y ago

A concept a High Performance Computing professor told me once: A program which is memory intensive must be slower then one which needs little memory -- just because load/write operations from the CPU take time. That's one of the reasons why some bloated contemporary desktop software (i.e. Slack) feels as fast as its historic counterpart did in 1995 (i.e. our MSN/ICQ clients back in these days).

fwip 8y ago
That's a nice sound bite, but isn't really true. There are many cases where we increase memory usage for faster software. Side note, lessons from HPC aren't really that applicable for chat programs.
- inetknght 8y ago
  Faster, or perhaps more features.
- vvanders 8y ago
  Conversely cache misses are painful and largely haven't gotten faster over the years.
  - mbreese 8y ago
    Exactly. And the reason why programs that use a lot of memory might feel slower than one with a little is that cache miss rate. Adding memory often makes an entire system faster (again, because you can cache things in the faster RAM rather than paging out to disk). But for two comparable programs, I could see the argument that the lower-memory footprint program would be faster. (For comparable programs).
    - vvanders 8y ago
      Yup, as DDR clock speed increased so have CAS timings.
    - fwip 8y ago

Dunedan 8y ago

The past couple of days I took a deeper look into the RAM usage of Android Studio as I had my fair share of problems with it. I'm not sure what the 3GB you mentioned include, but I made the following observations: - Android Studio itself: default heap size of 1280MB[1] plus ~400MB of metaspace - Gradle: That's the part which surprised me the most: - Most projects probably have a custom heap size set for Gradle. Turns out: If you're using Kotlin the same amount of heap size is also used for the Kotlin compile daemon. So if you configure -Xmx2G you'll end up with 2GB for the Gradle daemon and 2GB for the Kotlin compile daemon. The heap size for the Kotlin compile daemon can be separately configured by setting `-Dkotlin.daemon.jvm.options=-Xmx<xxx>`[2]. - Gradle 5.0 is way more memory efficient than the versions before and they even drastically lowered the default heap sizes[3]. - If you still have a custom heap size in your `dexOptions` set: that's not recommended anymore[4]. [1]: https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/studio-config https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/studio-config [2]: https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/solved-disable-kotlin-compiler-process-keepalive/2622 https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/solved-disable-kotlin-compi... [3]: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/6216 https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/6216 [4]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37230589/4779904 https://stackoverflow.com/a/37230589/4779904

agumonkey 8y ago

http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm I repeat http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

72deluxe 8y ago

Slack is running a chrome instance - look at it in detail using Sysinternal's Process Explorer. Skype now does the same. It's so grossly dumb - giant native applications running a hidden web browser to show a webpage that does it utmost to pretend to be a native application (but it doesn't work - Alt-F to launch the File menu in slack but cursor left/right doesn't take you to the next menu like REAL native apps do).... It's a future I do not wish to be involved with!

Dirlewanger 8y ago
It's the like saying about how giving developers 2 weeks worth of work to do in a month's timeframe, and watch it take a month: give web developers unlimited memory and they will find a way to make their desktop applications eat all of it.

ken 8y ago

I'm occasionally tempted to add RAM, but every year my OS and applications get more memory-efficient so I have less of an excuse to spend any money on that. I've got 16GB and it's getting more sufficient all the time! The latest compiler upgrades make it twice as fast as last year, on the same hardware. Life is pretty good. (Avoiding hardware upgrades isn't all peaches and cream. My graphics cards are getting less acceptable all the time, and I'll probably need to upgrade this year.) I don't use Chrome or Slack or any of those others. The easiest way to use less memory is to not run programs which require a bunch of it. People who drive Ferraris don't complain about their fuel economy.

swiley 8y ago

I feel like there’s some cultural problem that google has which prevents them from writing decent end user software.

gumby 8y ago

> Main [RAM] consumer: Chrome, just with a few dozen tabs open....Slack takes more than half a Gig with only 5 teams. It's a chat app, what the F? Because it's an Electron app, i.e. another copy of Chrome. Actually for all the money they've raised I can't understand why the Slack apps are so terrible. I use Mac and iOS versions, and they still can't show useful activity badges; video doesn't work on ios...what are the spending their billions on?

therealx 8y ago
We've opened a lot of tickets about the " useful activity badges" but they seem to think it's a feature, not a bug. (I assume to keep remote devs happy so managers can't drill down to the minute of time.) I know for sure that their underlying tool fo determine away time is very accurate.

e12e 8y ago

I mostly get by with wee-slack in a terminal. No in-line image support... But that can also be a feature. https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

mdorazio 8y ago
I feel like I'm going crazy here. Wee-slack looks exactly like IRC did 20 years ago, except IRC was free. This is madness.
- ants_a 8y ago
  Maybe if IRC people would have been able to evolve the system to add persistent history we wouldn't be where we are now. And no, sshing to a server to run irssi in screen is not, and never was, an acceptable answer.
  - syn0byte 8y ago
    Not until you wrap it in electron anyway. hacking up and rebranding an IRCd is a tried and true startup method. Napster, Slack, Discord...

dmead 8y ago

do you have a real reason you need to run chrome?