7 ms·

I recently had to upgrade my RAM because I have Spotify and Slack open all the time. Today RAM is cheap but it is crazy those programs take up so much resources

by thdrdt 6y ago

I recently had to upgrade my RAM because I have Spotify and Slack open all the time. Today RAM is cheap but it is crazy those programs take up so much resources. Another program I use a lot is Blender (3D software). Compared to Spotify and Slack it is a crazy complicated program with loads of complicated functionalities. But it starts in a blink and only uses resources when it needs to (calculations and your 3D model). So I absolutely agree with you. I also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do. We used computers without harddisk and KBs of RAM. I always have this in my mind while programming. The younger programmers may be right that resources don't matter much because they are cheap and available. But now I had to upgrade my RAM.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
I like to imagine 20 years in the future we’ll see articles posted on HN, or whatever the cool kids are reading by then ;) ... articles with titles like: “Slack in one Ruby statement” a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208431 More seriously though, Spotify and Slack are optimised to intentionally be huge time wasters, so it makes sense the organisations that produce them don’t care about performance / efficiency.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  Most Spotify user-hours are probably office workers or students pumping music into headphones while working. If anything it's a productivity application because it trades flagrantly unnecessary resource usage (streaming the same songs over and over) for users' time (no more dicking around crafting the perfect iPod). On the topic of flagrantly unnecessary resource usage... My first child was born six months ago. Newborns (we discovered) sleep better with white noise. So of course we found a three hour white noise track on Spotify and played it from our phones for every nap, never bothering to download it.
  - kingosticks 6y ago
    I find it hard to believe at least some of that that data wasn't cached on your device. Setting a track to be downloaded just means the cached data is evicted differently. If you run their desktop client with logging enabled you'll see this happening and I'd say it's likely to be the same across platforms. That is of course the actual reason they have a non-native app - to reuse the codebase and save money.
alexchamberlain 6y ago
I guess the question becomes: what is the native ecosystem missing that means devs are choosing to deliver memory/CPU hungry apps, rather than small efficient ones?
- thdrdt 6y ago
  (Easy) Cross platform publishing.
- quantummkv 6y ago
  HTML, CSS and Javascript. Most of these electron apps are basically wrappers around actual websites to give a place in the dock and show notifications and access the filesystem.
  - gindely 6y ago
    But that isn't what's missing. It's a restatement of the problem. DOM based apps are much more resource intensive than native. What is missing from native that makes business choose DOM? If there was some modern tool like WxWidgets that supported modern apis like DOM, Android and UWP, would we see more use of native? Electron would therefore become pointless.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Qt Quick takes plenty of ideas from the web playbook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML
    - fragmede 6y ago
      That is what's missing, albiet tersely stated. The hypothetical business has two choices. Choose Electron, or choose some other toolkit that has native, cross-platform support (like Qt). It's far easier for the business, and the developers there, to take their existing website HTML, CSS, and Javascript; and simply wrap it in Electron (which costs $0), and call it a day. Every other choice is (perceived as being) more expensive. Qt is a modern toolkit with native-cross platform support, but costs money for commercial use, and businesses and software developers don't want to spend the money on it.
Insanity 6y ago
If you don't mind me asking, how much RAM did you have before, and what did you upgrade to? I recently got a new PC myself and decided to go for 16GB, my previous one (about a decade old) had 8GB and I didn't feel I really hit the limit, but wanted to be future proof. Because as you said, a lot of 'modern' applications are taking up a lot of memory.
- thdrdt 6y ago
  I upgraded from 8 to 16GB. But I'm in the process of ordering a new desktop that will have 32GB. Spotify and Slack are not problematic as individual programs but since I have a lot of other programs open they are the ones that take up more memory than they should. I mean: Spotify is just a music player. Why does it need 250MB RAM?
  - tomsmeding 6y ago
    Because it is not just a music player. It plays music, aside from giving you an entire experience that consists of connecting with your friends, managing your music library, consuming ads, having a constant connection with the server, and ... This was meant to be sarcastic, but I'm not even sure how to continue. Maybe someone else can bulk up that list to get to something that requires 250MB. :)
  - theandrewbailey 6y ago
    64GB RAM is borderline reasonable today. Why not jump to that?
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    It probably uses it for buffering.
- Piskvorrr 6y ago
  I also went from 8GB to 16GB recently (virtual machines are hungry); but I had gotten rid of Slack even before that. I mean, yes, it has round edges and goes ping and has all those cutesy animations - but 2GB of RAM for a glorified IRC client, excuse me, what exactly is it doing with billions of bytes worth of memory? ("Don't know, don't care" seems to be its developers' mantra)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ClikeX 6y ago
As a younger developer I'd say I agree. But it's not just developers being used to resources being plentiful. I do webdev mostly and there it's also a matter of management. I want to optimize applications to be less hungry, those are interesting challenges to me. But I've been told by management to just upgrade the server. Either I'd spend a day optimizing, and maybe fixing the issue. Or we just spend 50 euros a month more on a server. Sometimes the optimization is not worth the effort. For applications like Blender? Optimization means a lot.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Either I'd spend a day optimizing, and maybe fixing the issue. Or we just spend 50 euros a month more on a server. So, discounting additional effects like more satisfied userbase, the optimization would pay for itself in a year. And optimizations stack.
  - ClikeX 6y ago
    Yes, that was my thought process as well. But management didn't agree. To them, the short term cost of me optimizing the problem was higher than the long term costs would be.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
> I also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do. I'm not convinced it's the programmers driving these decisions. Assuming that it takes less developer effort - even just a little - to implement an inefficient desktop application, it comes down to a business decision (assuming these are programs created by businesses, which Spotify and Slack are). The decision hinges on whether the extra cost results in extra income or reduced cost elsewhere. In practice people still use these programs so it seems the reduced income is minimal. What's more, the "extra cost" of a more efficient program is not just extra expense spent on developers - it's hard to hire developers so you probably wouldn't just hire an extra developer or two and get the same feature set with greater efficiency. Instead, that "extra cost" is an oppotunity cost: a reduced rate of implementing functionality. In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too. I'm not saying that I agree with it, but it's how the market works.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Maybe we need a power declaration of software as with dish washers. (No joke)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too. And the kicker is, consumers don't have a say in this process anyway. I don't know of anyone who chose Slack. It's universally handed down onto you from somewhere above you in the corporate, and you're forced to use it. Sure, a factor in this is that it works on multiple platforms (including mobile) and you don't have to worry about setting it up for yourself, but that has nothing to do with the in-app features and overall UX. Or Spotify, whose biggest value is that it's a cheap and legal alternative to pirating music. And that value has, again, nothing to do with softare, and everything to do with the deals they've managed to secure with artists and labels. I exercise my preferences wrt. Slack by using Ripcord instead of the official client. Most people I know exercise their preferences wrt. Spotify by using YouTube instead (which is arguably lighter resource-wise). And speaking of alternative clients, maybe that could be the way to go - focus on monetizing the service, but embrace different ways of accessing it. Alas, time and again, companies show they prefer total control over the ecosystem surrounding their service.
ljm 6y ago
It really surprised me when I downloaded Godot only to get a 32MB binary. Snappy as hell. Web apps masquerading as desktop apps are terribly slow and it's a surprise we've got so used to it. My slack client takes a few seconds to launch, then it has a loading screen, and quite often it will refresh itself (blanking out the screen and doing a full-blown re-render) without warning. This is before it starts spinning the fans when trying to scroll up a thread, and all of the other awkward and inconsistent pieces of UI thrown in there. Never mind having to download a 500MB package just to use a glorified IRC client. I'm really enjoying writing code outside of the browser realm where I can care a lot more about resource usage, using languages and tools that help achieve that.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's interesting to compare Ripcord[0] to Slack. Ripcord is a third-party desktop client for Slack and Discord. It has something like 80% of features of the official Slack client and a simpler UI (arguably better, more information-dense), but it's also a good two orders of magnitude lighter and snappier. And it also handles Discord at the same time. -- [0] - https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    and is written by a single person, in Qt
  - MivLives 6y ago
    I wish so much that 3rd party clients weren't directly against the TOS of Discord. I sorta miss the old days where it seemed like anyone could hook up to MSN/Yahoo/AIM.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      I wish that too. More than that, I keep wondering whether there could be a way to force companies to interop, because right now you generally can't, without getting into some sort of business relationship with these companies. That's the problem with services - they take control of interop, and the extent to which interop is allowed is controlled by contracts between service providers.
gindely 6y ago
> But now I had to upgrade my RAM. But I can't. My ram is soldered on. How many tons of carbon dioxide should I emit so that you can use React? There are ways to do declarative ui/state management without dom...
- arvinsim 6y ago
  If carbon footprint is that important to you, maybe you should find ways to encourage companies not to solder on RAM instead.
  - jschwartzi 6y ago
    Why not both? My computer still computes with 2 GB of ram. It’s just that developers are gluing more and more stuff together to do things we did on Pentium processors with 64 MB of ram.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - headlamp 6y ago
    no. just because soldered on ram is bad doesn't mean that bad code is ok.
swalsh 6y ago
Something I noticed over my career. Programmers tend to get super beefy machines. My machine has 64GB of memory, and 12 cores. But the typical users who use our software don't have anywhere near those same specs.. but programmers often just say "it worked on my machine" without thought about the specs.
- pcmaffey 6y ago
  Same problem exists with designers and monitors.
nullandvoid 6y ago
Pair that with some discord, vs code and chrome and all of a sudden my 16gb is getting maxed semi regularly Just had to upgrade to 32 myself
- NeutronStar 6y ago
  I just got to that point of needing more than 16GB and needing to upgrade also.
ta17711771 6y ago
m.spotify.com..?

by thdrdt 6y ago

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

I like to imagine 20 years in the future we’ll see articles posted on HN, or whatever the cool kids are reading by then ;) ... articles with titles like: “Slack in one Ruby statement” a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208431 More seriously though, Spotify and Slack are optimised to intentionally be huge time wasters, so it makes sense the organisations that produce them don’t care about performance / efficiency.

neutronicus 6y ago
Most Spotify user-hours are probably office workers or students pumping music into headphones while working. If anything it's a productivity application because it trades flagrantly unnecessary resource usage (streaming the same songs over and over) for users' time (no more dicking around crafting the perfect iPod). On the topic of flagrantly unnecessary resource usage... My first child was born six months ago. Newborns (we discovered) sleep better with white noise. So of course we found a three hour white noise track on Spotify and played it from our phones for every nap, never bothering to download it.
- kingosticks 6y ago
  I find it hard to believe at least some of that that data wasn't cached on your device. Setting a track to be downloaded just means the cached data is evicted differently. If you run their desktop client with logging enabled you'll see this happening and I'd say it's likely to be the same across platforms. That is of course the actual reason they have a non-native app - to reuse the codebase and save money.

alexchamberlain 6y ago

I guess the question becomes: what is the native ecosystem missing that means devs are choosing to deliver memory/CPU hungry apps, rather than small efficient ones?

thdrdt 6y ago
(Easy) Cross platform publishing.
quantummkv 6y ago
HTML, CSS and Javascript. Most of these electron apps are basically wrappers around actual websites to give a place in the dock and show notifications and access the filesystem.
- gindely 6y ago
  But that isn't what's missing. It's a restatement of the problem. DOM based apps are much more resource intensive than native. What is missing from native that makes business choose DOM? If there was some modern tool like WxWidgets that supported modern apis like DOM, Android and UWP, would we see more use of native? Electron would therefore become pointless.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Qt Quick takes plenty of ideas from the web playbook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML
  - fragmede 6y ago
    That is what's missing, albiet tersely stated. The hypothetical business has two choices. Choose Electron, or choose some other toolkit that has native, cross-platform support (like Qt). It's far easier for the business, and the developers there, to take their existing website HTML, CSS, and Javascript; and simply wrap it in Electron (which costs $0), and call it a day. Every other choice is (perceived as being) more expensive. Qt is a modern toolkit with native-cross platform support, but costs money for commercial use, and businesses and software developers don't want to spend the money on it.

Insanity 6y ago

If you don't mind me asking, how much RAM did you have before, and what did you upgrade to? I recently got a new PC myself and decided to go for 16GB, my previous one (about a decade old) had 8GB and I didn't feel I really hit the limit, but wanted to be future proof. Because as you said, a lot of 'modern' applications are taking up a lot of memory.

thdrdt 6y ago
I upgraded from 8 to 16GB. But I'm in the process of ordering a new desktop that will have 32GB. Spotify and Slack are not problematic as individual programs but since I have a lot of other programs open they are the ones that take up more memory than they should. I mean: Spotify is just a music player. Why does it need 250MB RAM?
- tomsmeding 6y ago
  Because it is not just a music player. It plays music, aside from giving you an entire experience that consists of connecting with your friends, managing your music library, consuming ads, having a constant connection with the server, and ... This was meant to be sarcastic, but I'm not even sure how to continue. Maybe someone else can bulk up that list to get to something that requires 250MB. :)
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  64GB RAM is borderline reasonable today. Why not jump to that?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  It probably uses it for buffering.
Piskvorrr 6y ago
I also went from 8GB to 16GB recently (virtual machines are hungry); but I had gotten rid of Slack even before that. I mean, yes, it has round edges and goes ping and has all those cutesy animations - but 2GB of RAM for a glorified IRC client, excuse me, what exactly is it doing with billions of bytes worth of memory? ("Don't know, don't care" seems to be its developers' mantra)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ClikeX 6y ago

As a younger developer I'd say I agree. But it's not just developers being used to resources being plentiful. I do webdev mostly and there it's also a matter of management. I want to optimize applications to be less hungry, those are interesting challenges to me. But I've been told by management to just upgrade the server. Either I'd spend a day optimizing, and maybe fixing the issue. Or we just spend 50 euros a month more on a server. Sometimes the optimization is not worth the effort. For applications like Blender? Optimization means a lot.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Either I'd spend a day optimizing, and maybe fixing the issue. Or we just spend 50 euros a month more on a server. So, discounting additional effects like more satisfied userbase, the optimization would pay for itself in a year. And optimizations stack.
- ClikeX 6y ago
  Yes, that was my thought process as well. But management didn't agree. To them, the short term cost of me optimizing the problem was higher than the long term costs would be.

quietbritishjim 6y ago

> I also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do. I'm not convinced it's the programmers driving these decisions. Assuming that it takes less developer effort - even just a little - to implement an inefficient desktop application, it comes down to a business decision (assuming these are programs created by businesses, which Spotify and Slack are). The decision hinges on whether the extra cost results in extra income or reduced cost elsewhere. In practice people still use these programs so it seems the reduced income is minimal. What's more, the "extra cost" of a more efficient program is not just extra expense spent on developers - it's hard to hire developers so you probably wouldn't just hire an extra developer or two and get the same feature set with greater efficiency. Instead, that "extra cost" is an oppotunity cost: a reduced rate of implementing functionality. In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too. I'm not saying that I agree with it, but it's how the market works.

rightbyte 6y ago
Maybe we need a power declaration of software as with dish washers. (No joke)
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too. And the kicker is, consumers don't have a say in this process anyway. I don't know of anyone who chose Slack. It's universally handed down onto you from somewhere above you in the corporate, and you're forced to use it. Sure, a factor in this is that it works on multiple platforms (including mobile) and you don't have to worry about setting it up for yourself, but that has nothing to do with the in-app features and overall UX. Or Spotify, whose biggest value is that it's a cheap and legal alternative to pirating music. And that value has, again, nothing to do with softare, and everything to do with the deals they've managed to secure with artists and labels. I exercise my preferences wrt. Slack by using Ripcord instead of the official client. Most people I know exercise their preferences wrt. Spotify by using YouTube instead (which is arguably lighter resource-wise). And speaking of alternative clients, maybe that could be the way to go - focus on monetizing the service, but embrace different ways of accessing it. Alas, time and again, companies show they prefer total control over the ecosystem surrounding their service.

ljm 6y ago

It really surprised me when I downloaded Godot only to get a 32MB binary. Snappy as hell. Web apps masquerading as desktop apps are terribly slow and it's a surprise we've got so used to it. My slack client takes a few seconds to launch, then it has a loading screen, and quite often it will refresh itself (blanking out the screen and doing a full-blown re-render) without warning. This is before it starts spinning the fans when trying to scroll up a thread, and all of the other awkward and inconsistent pieces of UI thrown in there. Never mind having to download a 500MB package just to use a glorified IRC client. I'm really enjoying writing code outside of the browser realm where I can care a lot more about resource usage, using languages and tools that help achieve that.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
It's interesting to compare Ripcord[0] to Slack. Ripcord is a third-party desktop client for Slack and Discord. It has something like 80% of features of the official Slack client and a simpler UI (arguably better, more information-dense), but it's also a good two orders of magnitude lighter and snappier. And it also handles Discord at the same time. -- [0] - https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
- jcelerier 6y ago
  and is written by a single person, in Qt
- MivLives 6y ago
  I wish so much that 3rd party clients weren't directly against the TOS of Discord. I sorta miss the old days where it seemed like anyone could hook up to MSN/Yahoo/AIM.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I wish that too. More than that, I keep wondering whether there could be a way to force companies to interop, because right now you generally can't, without getting into some sort of business relationship with these companies. That's the problem with services - they take control of interop, and the extent to which interop is allowed is controlled by contracts between service providers.

gindely 6y ago

> But now I had to upgrade my RAM. But I can't. My ram is soldered on. How many tons of carbon dioxide should I emit so that you can use React? There are ways to do declarative ui/state management without dom...

arvinsim 6y ago
If carbon footprint is that important to you, maybe you should find ways to encourage companies not to solder on RAM instead.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Why not both? My computer still computes with 2 GB of ram. It’s just that developers are gluing more and more stuff together to do things we did on Pentium processors with 64 MB of ram.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- headlamp 6y ago
  no. just because soldered on ram is bad doesn't mean that bad code is ok.

swalsh 6y ago

Something I noticed over my career. Programmers tend to get super beefy machines. My machine has 64GB of memory, and 12 cores. But the typical users who use our software don't have anywhere near those same specs.. but programmers often just say "it worked on my machine" without thought about the specs.

pcmaffey 6y ago
Same problem exists with designers and monitors.

nullandvoid 6y ago

Pair that with some discord, vs code and chrome and all of a sudden my 16gb is getting maxed semi regularly Just had to upgrade to 32 myself

NeutronStar 6y ago
I just got to that point of needing more than 16GB and needing to upgrade also.

ta17711771 6y ago

m.spotify.com..?