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The idea not to save data to disk means that they have to be kept in RAM, and Chrome will take even more of it. It's fine if you have an expensive system with t

The idea not to save data to disk means that they have to be kept in RAM, and Chrome will take even more of it. It's fine if you have an expensive system with tens of gigabytes, but what if you have only 4 or 2 Gb? Also, why save energy when you are on AC power most of the time? I remember that watching a long video on Youtube in WinXP could take as much as 400 Mb of RAM. Are they going to increase memory consumption?

wwwigham 7y ago
If you run out of RAM virtual memory means excess pages will just get written to/read from disk, usually. Which is... Not really different than what it does now, I think?
- codedokode 7y ago
  Swapping is mostly random access operations, writing small blocks here and there, HDD can do about 100 seeks/sec, and it gives speed less that 1 Mb/s while sequential read/write gives speeds of order of tens Mb/s.
SturgeonsLaw 7y ago
I would assume that in a low memory scenario it would be paging to disk and we'd be back where we were in the first place
- codedokode 7y ago
  It is not the same situation. If you write/read video sequentially, you get speeds about tens of Mb/s, and with swapping you get random access with speeds < 1Mb/s on HDD. So having limited memory buffer for video is better for the whole system.
Jonnax 7y ago
A raspberry pi can have 4gb of ram. Cheap android phones come with 4gb ram these days as well. At some point software needs to stop catering for miniscule percentages of users.
- dtech 7y ago
  Feature phones are a large thing in developing nations, but then again I don't know if those are running Chrome or watching videos.
- Faark 7y ago
  I'm currently on 4gb (ram sticks slowly died one after another, hope to replace the pc soon) and yes, Firefox taking up an entire gb is pushing it. Windows takes about 2gb for itself, leaving annoyingly little for other tasks. ~15% of steam users have 4gb or less [0]. And I doubt gaming PCs drag the total average down. So yeah, only a "miniscule percentages of users" caring about ram usage of browsers doesn't seem based in reality we still live in. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

wwwigham 7y ago

If you run out of RAM virtual memory means excess pages will just get written to/read from disk, usually. Which is... Not really different than what it does now, I think?

codedokode 7y ago
Swapping is mostly random access operations, writing small blocks here and there, HDD can do about 100 seeks/sec, and it gives speed less that 1 Mb/s while sequential read/write gives speeds of order of tens Mb/s.

SturgeonsLaw 7y ago

I would assume that in a low memory scenario it would be paging to disk and we'd be back where we were in the first place

codedokode 7y ago
It is not the same situation. If you write/read video sequentially, you get speeds about tens of Mb/s, and with swapping you get random access with speeds < 1Mb/s on HDD. So having limited memory buffer for video is better for the whole system.

Jonnax 7y ago

A raspberry pi can have 4gb of ram. Cheap android phones come with 4gb ram these days as well. At some point software needs to stop catering for miniscule percentages of users.

dtech 7y ago
Feature phones are a large thing in developing nations, but then again I don't know if those are running Chrome or watching videos.
Faark 7y ago
I'm currently on 4gb (ram sticks slowly died one after another, hope to replace the pc soon) and yes, Firefox taking up an entire gb is pushing it. Windows takes about 2gb for itself, leaving annoyingly little for other tasks. ~15% of steam users have 4gb or less [0]. And I doubt gaming PCs drag the total average down. So yeah, only a "miniscule percentages of users" caring about ram usage of browsers doesn't seem based in reality we still live in. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey