7 ms·
what are you doing with an ultra book that would make it need 32gb of ram?
by hknapp 6y ago
what are you doing with an ultra book that would make it need 32gb of ram?
- bitwize 6y agoRunning Slack.
- philliphaydon 6y agoOr chrome. Need 64gb option to run both.
- whatch 6y agoOr Firefox. (writing this from Firefox on Thinkpad with 16GB of RAM)
- fernandotakai 6y agofunny thing: firefox is using ~433mb of ram with ~15 tabs (including gmail, graphql playground, youtube). slack alone is using 300mb. discord is using another 300mb.
- philliphaydon 6y agoI just checked mine my slack because I thought 300mb was too low for slack, mine is using 68mb, it used to chew like 1gb... Did they optimize it or something.
- iso1631 6y agoNo optimisations here: Slack is using VIRT: 24.868g, RSS: 1.919g, SHR: 526924 Next highest single process is Firefox with 1G RSS and 5G Virt. I have 113 tabs open at the moment, although there's about 4G of RSS in "Web Content" processes which are firefox related.
- whatch 6y agoJust curious, how many extensions do you have? I'm trying not to bloat my browser too much with them, but have 3-4 privacy related extensions and a couple of utility ones. Right now I have 22 tabs and Firefox uses 5-6 GB of RAM. Restart decreases RAM usage, but Firefox slowly eats RAM again. I remember recently I freed 10GB of RAM just by restarting Firefox. I literally looked at Ubuntu's System Monitor. And I keep everything updated. Tried to play with settings in about:config, made even worse and reset.
- fernandotakai 6y agoi'm using firefox nightly, with just a handful of extensions. vim vixen, lastpass, ublock origin and simple tab groups. that's on linux, latest nightly.
- superhuzza 6y agoI honestly can't tell if you're being serious. I'm using a 6/7 year old ASUS with 8gb of RAM. It has no problems running 20 Chrome tabs, Slack, Spotify, VSCode all at once. Are these programs really pushing people's laptops that hard, or is my laptop some kind of weird mega-performer?
- philliphaydon 6y agoWhile they do chew any ram available. It is an over exaggeration.
- nobleach 6y agoI'm always confused why my experience never matches that of others in this arena. I run bare i3 and NeoVim. When I add Slack, Chrome and Spotify, I often see 12 Gigs of usage after a couple of days. Most of the time it comes down to Chrome's tabs... and Slack appearing to be leaky. I've recently started using an extension for Chrome which puts my tabs to sleep and frees the memory they were using. But still, I'm sitting at 8.33 Gigs of RAM used.
- Joeri 6y agoChrome is bad with memory if you’re a tab hoarder, and some extensions can also be problematic. They have an update in the pipeline which will dramatically decrease memory use for background tabs. I haven’t really seen the memory problems with slack, but we use the free slack without extensions. Maybe it has a similar problem with extensions?
- 72deluxe 6y agoHaha it's insane why it would need so much RAM for chat. It's truly insane.
- bitwize 6y agoNot really. It's a matter of which variable do you optimize for? There was a lot of Hackernews moaning on the thread for the blog post where the guy laments Kubernetes and its effect on etcd -- about how modern software is too complex and this and that. But simplicity is not what they're optimizing for. They're optimizing for productivity -- specifically, how fast a typical corporate webdev shop can go from zero to working app. That's really the only thing that matters, because there's no room for something like Qt in today's move-fast-break-things environment. Qt means developing, compiling, testing, and supporting across multiple platforms which a modern webdev shop may not even be able to do if they had the budget for it (which they don't). Hell, there's barely room for any language besides JavaScript. So hence, we get Electron and we get memory bloat. And it's perfectly reasonable, given the right perspective.
- samoa42 6y ago> But simplicity is not what they're optimizing for. They're optimizing for productivity it's not only simplicity we're leaving on the table but efficiancy (resource usage) as well. this is not sustainable industry practice (see climate crisis, rare earth depletion). the need for ever more hastly crafted apps is compareable to the need for cheap plastic toys from the 1-dollar store i.e highly questionable.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoThere are FPGA synthesis tools that recommend 32GB (Depending on the chip you are targeting). If you have to keep jumping between an office desk and an R&D lab then an ultrabook is convenient. Arguably you can schedule an FPGA synthesis or bitstream generation job on a build server rather than locally but I am just saying this an example of a use-case.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoLots of VMs. VMs don't need much CPU time but oh boy do they need the RAM.
- regularfry 6y agoThis is one place containers do genuinely have the edge (if you can stomach running them outside a VM, of course...)
- pqb 6y agoI don't feel right to ask this question using "Ask HN" - how many VMs you usually run?
- amalantony06 6y agoWhat sort of a use case requires you to run "lots of VMs"? What nature of development do you do?
- rwmj 6y agoSome of the software I write must work on various different Linux releases (with different kernels), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Haiku and Windows. This is realistically only possible because I have all these running in different VMs. I'd like to add macOS to the mix but it's something of a pain to virtualize. I'm aware of hackintoshes but there seem to be a bunch of gotchas and it seems you can never upgrade them. I also have some VMs where I need decent security guarantees and confinement, such as running different web services.
- amalantony06 6y agoMakes sense, thank you!