3 ms·

This may be a stupid point, but, for personal use of computers in their current form, how much memory do you really need? I’m still a little baffled why chrome

by gswdh 6y ago

This may be a stupid point, but, for personal use of computers in their current form, how much memory do you really need? I’m still a little baffled why chrome requires GBs of memory...? Can we have lean software please?

jiggawatts 6y ago
In a word: No. CPUs have become so fast that relative to their "internal" speeds, RAM is the new hard disk. Databases are becoming in-memory, and going out to fixed storage, even SSD, is an anathema. New applications are not designed to work on data sets bigger than physical memory. Disk-to-disk streaming algorithms are practically unheard of outside of a few niche scenarios. Like I said, even database vendors are moving to in-memory! I love machines with huge amounts of memory. My laptop has 64 GB, and it's great! I can run entire fleets of servers in a local hypervisor. I can load huge blobs of CSV or JSON data into the shell and not have to worry about the 2-5x overhead of the in-memory representation. It'll fit just fine. I can run every "bloated" app at once and still have 50 GB free for "whatever". I've reindexed a database on my laptop in minutes that would have taken days(!) on a production server because it didn't have enough RAM and was thrashing the storage like crazy. Another way to look at it is the "GB per CPU core". With existing AMD EPYC 2 CPUs having 64 cores and 128 threads, the typical 512 GB memory configuration is "only" 8 GB per core, or 4 GB per thread! With a dual-socket server, halve those numbers again. Similarly, mainstream desktop Ryzen CPUs have up to 16 cores, and that's not even talking about the not-so-mainstream Threadripper line. For 4GB per core, you'd need 64 GB. It's likely that AMD will release 24 or 32 core mainstream CPUs in the near future, maybe as soon as 2 years from now when their 5nm products start shipping. I fully expect server CPUs to hit 96-128 cores per socket around the same time frame, or up to 512 hardware threads in a standard two-socket server. Terabytes of memory is going to become "standard" very soon now.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Wow, someone must be running really lean software if they can run all bloated apps at once and only use 14GB. I switched to 32GB because a single application decided it absolutely needed 8GB RAM.
- labawi 6y ago
  It really is nice when you can afford to have the latest doubling of memory, and do things you couldn't do easily before. Maybe run an entire DC on your computer. Works very well while you're on the upper end. However, that does not address the sheer wastefulness of our technological trends to require more resources to do things slower, but displayed with smaller and more colorful pixels. Should everyone have a 64-core 512GB memory computer to view web pages, play minecraft or whatever? Will that be too small to write a text document in 20 years time? Will every person on the planet be expected to get a bigger computer because they can't run the (electron-in-ethereum-on-browser-in-container)^n pancomputer?
ATsch 6y ago
People always mention more memory usage as a bad thing, but with Moore's Law slowing down, we are being forced to find other ways to speed up computation. One of those ways is trading memory usage for performance via look up tables, caching, duplication, less compact data storage, etc. I would expect memory usage to rise significantly as long as memory technology advances quickly while clockspeeds remain flat.
staticassertion 6y ago
Based on what's on my existing system I think I could benefit from ~1TB of memory. Above that I'd have to probably try. After maybe ~200GB I bet I'd start to see seriously diminishing returns. My servers could probably benefit from, idk, petabytes? If I could keep the entirety of my server's hard drive in RAM I'd be very happy.

by gswdh 6y ago

jiggawatts 6y ago

In a word: No. CPUs have become so fast that relative to their "internal" speeds, RAM is the new hard disk. Databases are becoming in-memory, and going out to fixed storage, even SSD, is an anathema. New applications are not designed to work on data sets bigger than physical memory. Disk-to-disk streaming algorithms are practically unheard of outside of a few niche scenarios. Like I said, even database vendors are moving to in-memory! I love machines with huge amounts of memory. My laptop has 64 GB, and it's great! I can run entire fleets of servers in a local hypervisor. I can load huge blobs of CSV or JSON data into the shell and not have to worry about the 2-5x overhead of the in-memory representation. It'll fit just fine. I can run every "bloated" app at once and still have 50 GB free for "whatever". I've reindexed a database on my laptop in minutes that would have taken days(!) on a production server because it didn't have enough RAM and was thrashing the storage like crazy. Another way to look at it is the "GB per CPU core". With existing AMD EPYC 2 CPUs having 64 cores and 128 threads, the typical 512 GB memory configuration is "only" 8 GB per core, or 4 GB per thread! With a dual-socket server, halve those numbers again. Similarly, mainstream desktop Ryzen CPUs have up to 16 cores, and that's not even talking about the not-so-mainstream Threadripper line. For 4GB per core, you'd need 64 GB. It's likely that AMD will release 24 or 32 core mainstream CPUs in the near future, maybe as soon as 2 years from now when their 5nm products start shipping. I fully expect server CPUs to hit 96-128 cores per socket around the same time frame, or up to 512 hardware threads in a standard two-socket server. Terabytes of memory is going to become "standard" very soon now.

imtringued 6y ago
Wow, someone must be running really lean software if they can run all bloated apps at once and only use 14GB. I switched to 32GB because a single application decided it absolutely needed 8GB RAM.
labawi 6y ago
It really is nice when you can afford to have the latest doubling of memory, and do things you couldn't do easily before. Maybe run an entire DC on your computer. Works very well while you're on the upper end. However, that does not address the sheer wastefulness of our technological trends to require more resources to do things slower, but displayed with smaller and more colorful pixels. Should everyone have a 64-core 512GB memory computer to view web pages, play minecraft or whatever? Will that be too small to write a text document in 20 years time? Will every person on the planet be expected to get a bigger computer because they can't run the (electron-in-ethereum-on-browser-in-container)^n pancomputer?

ATsch 6y ago

People always mention more memory usage as a bad thing, but with Moore's Law slowing down, we are being forced to find other ways to speed up computation. One of those ways is trading memory usage for performance via look up tables, caching, duplication, less compact data storage, etc. I would expect memory usage to rise significantly as long as memory technology advances quickly while clockspeeds remain flat.

staticassertion 6y ago

Based on what's on my existing system I think I could benefit from ~1TB of memory. Above that I'd have to probably try. After maybe ~200GB I bet I'd start to see seriously diminishing returns. My servers could probably benefit from, idk, petabytes? If I could keep the entirety of my server's hard drive in RAM I'd be very happy.