5 ms·

Ram is meant to be used. Ram should be 100% utilized

amirmasoudabdol 7y ago
You seem to be ignoring a very important factor here, energy consumption. RAM usage has a direct effect on battery usage and battery usage is an important factor and selling point these days.
- jarfil 7y ago
  Does it? I was under the impression that all the installed RAM got refreshed all the time whether it holds useful data or not.
- fourthark 7y ago
  Surely not as bad as disk.
- slovenlyrobot 7y ago
  RAM _capacity_ has a direct effect on energy, usage not nearly much if at all. Hardware has been around to selectively put banks into low power saving mode, but I've never heard of any commodity OS that supported anything like that. It'd require active organization of physical pages to take advantage of, if common controllers even supported it
  - sephamorr 7y ago
    Note that most of RAM's power consumption comes from reading and writing (a function of memory clock speed). Allocating the RAM itself is likely to meaningfully increase power draw, but accessing it will.
    - belltaco 7y ago
      Are there any benchmarks around showing this? And how much extra power draw it is.
- daeken 7y ago
  The state of bits in RAM has zero effect on energy usage. Caching things in memory allows for lower power consumption, though, by preventing duplication of effort by the CPU. Edit: Originally said "zero effect on memory usage", which makes very little sense!
liability 7y ago
Yes, but if your application assumes that it should use 100% of my RAM, it's being antisocial. Don't assume that I don't have more important software that could be utilizing my RAM in ways more important to me. That's what drives me up a wall whenever people use the "free RAM is wasted RAM" argument; the assumption that RAM unused by your software is unused by me.
- codedokode 7y ago
  Android found a kind of solution for this by agressively killing processes (while saving their state). This seems to be effective because developers are not motivated to help competing applications, they want to have all resources for themselves.
  - liability 7y ago
    That's perhaps great in android, but you can't/shouldn't write code for Linux/Windows/MacOS, where such a system is not in use, and then protest "I'm not the one that sucks." Maybe those OSes should implement such a system, but until they have the "wasted RAM" argument needs to end for anything other than specialty professional software that can reasonably assume itself to be the raison d'être of that computer (e.g. video editing software, CAD, build systems for large software projects, etc.)
    - ferzul 7y ago
      Windows has such a system with UWP. I think UbTouch or whatever the Ubuntu phone successor distribution is called has one too. And I imagine most systems programmers could define an api if they wanted to. I think this is definitely a case where apps need to be antisocial and operating systems need to peg them in. The age of cooperative multitasking is over. Let the OS decide.
      - liability 7y ago
        Harming users to coerce OS designers is a pretty shitty plan. Sorry if that's too blunt, but that's simply the way I feel.
codedokode 7y ago
I have 4 Gb of RAM and most of time it is utulized over 100%. Not a very pleasant experience with modern Electron apps and reactive HTML5 sites.
Spooky23 7y ago
Try running Office, Chrome and Teams on a constrained system, then say that again!
detuur 7y ago
Spoken like someone who has truly zero understanding of how RAM usage relates to performance. Repeat after me: high data locality reduces the amount of cache misses, which drastically reduces memory latency, and is only achievable through systematic memory usage conservativism.
- nambit 7y ago
  You're assuming this person understands data locality, or memory latency or even memory in general.

You seem to be ignoring a very important factor here, energy consumption. RAM usage has a direct effect on battery usage and battery usage is an important factor and selling point these days.

jarfil 7y ago
Does it? I was under the impression that all the installed RAM got refreshed all the time whether it holds useful data or not.
fourthark 7y ago
Surely not as bad as disk.
slovenlyrobot 7y ago
RAM _capacity_ has a direct effect on energy, usage not nearly much if at all. Hardware has been around to selectively put banks into low power saving mode, but I've never heard of any commodity OS that supported anything like that. It'd require active organization of physical pages to take advantage of, if common controllers even supported it
- sephamorr 7y ago
  Note that most of RAM's power consumption comes from reading and writing (a function of memory clock speed). Allocating the RAM itself is likely to meaningfully increase power draw, but accessing it will.
  - belltaco 7y ago
    Are there any benchmarks around showing this? And how much extra power draw it is.
daeken 7y ago
The state of bits in RAM has zero effect on energy usage. Caching things in memory allows for lower power consumption, though, by preventing duplication of effort by the CPU. Edit: Originally said "zero effect on memory usage", which makes very little sense!

liability 7y ago

Yes, but if your application assumes that it should use 100% of my RAM, it's being antisocial. Don't assume that I don't have more important software that could be utilizing my RAM in ways more important to me. That's what drives me up a wall whenever people use the "free RAM is wasted RAM" argument; the assumption that RAM unused by your software is unused by me.

codedokode 7y ago
Android found a kind of solution for this by agressively killing processes (while saving their state). This seems to be effective because developers are not motivated to help competing applications, they want to have all resources for themselves.
- liability 7y ago
  That's perhaps great in android, but you can't/shouldn't write code for Linux/Windows/MacOS, where such a system is not in use, and then protest "I'm not the one that sucks." Maybe those OSes should implement such a system, but until they have the "wasted RAM" argument needs to end for anything other than specialty professional software that can reasonably assume itself to be the raison d'être of that computer (e.g. video editing software, CAD, build systems for large software projects, etc.)
  - ferzul 7y ago
    Windows has such a system with UWP. I think UbTouch or whatever the Ubuntu phone successor distribution is called has one too. And I imagine most systems programmers could define an api if they wanted to. I think this is definitely a case where apps need to be antisocial and operating systems need to peg them in. The age of cooperative multitasking is over. Let the OS decide.
    - liability 7y ago
      Harming users to coerce OS designers is a pretty shitty plan. Sorry if that's too blunt, but that's simply the way I feel.

codedokode 7y ago

I have 4 Gb of RAM and most of time it is utulized over 100%. Not a very pleasant experience with modern Electron apps and reactive HTML5 sites.

Spooky23 7y ago

Try running Office, Chrome and Teams on a constrained system, then say that again!

detuur 7y ago

Spoken like someone who has truly zero understanding of how RAM usage relates to performance. Repeat after me: high data locality reduces the amount of cache misses, which drastically reduces memory latency, and is only achievable through systematic memory usage conservativism.

nambit 7y ago
You're assuming this person understands data locality, or memory latency or even memory in general.