4 ms·

> Why do you have 16 GB of RAM or whatever in your laptop if not for applications to use? Why do you earn money if not to spend it?

chrisseaton 7y ago
I don’t really understand your question. I do spend, invest, and gift the money I make and I wouldn’t bother making it if didn’t need and want to do those things. And you’ve already spent the money on your RAM. Why do you want it to sit idle when it could be being used to, for example, decrease sync time in Dropbox? To reduce memory consumption of Dropbox costs money. Either via development time at Dropbox (so an increase in your subscription fee), via power drawn at your socket, or perhaps somewhere else. Why are people here so utterly convinced that reducing memory consumption is the right place to spend money to get the best value? What do they know that I don’t?
- anoncake 7y ago
  > Why do you want it to sit idle I don't. It's still a limited resource and Dropbox is not the only thing people run.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Battery is also a limited resource. As is developer time. Why is memory the most important one to optimise for? If you want Dropbox to reduce memory use will you start complaining that they’re fixing fewer bugs or syncing is taking longer?
    - 72deluxe 7y ago
      Honestly, why would sync take longer? I don't know how you do it but when sending data from a file, I read chunks of the file and send the chunk I have read, not the entire thing. These chunks can be very small, particulary as the MTU over a network is something like 1500 bytes (unless using jumbo frames). So to sync 10 files in tandem (10 threads), they would need 10 * 1500 bytes for the read buffers (+ overhead for storing the file pointers). Even you can see that it is a tiny amount of RAM required for this. Or are you somehow living in a world where your internet upload speed is somehow faster than reading from disk or memory, and your network interface has to wait for reading from disk/memory??? Are they reading the synced files entirely into memory or something stupid like that?

chrisseaton 7y ago

I don’t really understand your question. I do spend, invest, and gift the money I make and I wouldn’t bother making it if didn’t need and want to do those things. And you’ve already spent the money on your RAM. Why do you want it to sit idle when it could be being used to, for example, decrease sync time in Dropbox? To reduce memory consumption of Dropbox costs money. Either via development time at Dropbox (so an increase in your subscription fee), via power drawn at your socket, or perhaps somewhere else. Why are people here so utterly convinced that reducing memory consumption is the right place to spend money to get the best value? What do they know that I don’t?

anoncake 7y ago
> Why do you want it to sit idle I don't. It's still a limited resource and Dropbox is not the only thing people run.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Battery is also a limited resource. As is developer time. Why is memory the most important one to optimise for? If you want Dropbox to reduce memory use will you start complaining that they’re fixing fewer bugs or syncing is taking longer?
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    Honestly, why would sync take longer? I don't know how you do it but when sending data from a file, I read chunks of the file and send the chunk I have read, not the entire thing. These chunks can be very small, particulary as the MTU over a network is something like 1500 bytes (unless using jumbo frames). So to sync 10 files in tandem (10 threads), they would need 10 * 1500 bytes for the read buffers (+ overhead for storing the file pointers). Even you can see that it is a tiny amount of RAM required for this. Or are you somehow living in a world where your internet upload speed is somehow faster than reading from disk or memory, and your network interface has to wait for reading from disk/memory??? Are they reading the synced files entirely into memory or something stupid like that?