2 ms·

I had 50+ tabs opened on my M1 8/256GB as a dev while running an IDE and a few local servers. It was fine. I hardly think that the general mass has problems w

I had 50+ tabs opened on my M1 8/256GB as a dev while running an IDE and a few local servers. It was fine. I hardly think that the general mass has problems with Chrome on a 8/256 Apple Silicon Mac.

calciphus 3y ago
If we are doing anecdotes, a single tab Google doc with Grammarly running can easily surpass 4Gb of ram, especially if the doc is over about 30 pages. Use cases like that are not particularly uncommon.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  But did it affect the overall user experience? I was a heavy Google Docs user myself on my 8/256 M1 Air.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  It's not actually using 4gb of ram. Pretty much every memory reporting tool cannot handle paging and will report total allocated. You can create a one line c program today that just calls mmap(file) on a large 4gb media file and your os will claim 4gb used. Actually measuring real physical ram usage is hard. I'd be looking for page table misses (and the likely noticable resulting performance issues) as a better indication of any potential issues.
AnotherGoodName 3y ago
Yep one thing in this discussion is that people have no idea how to read memory usage. A 4GB set of videos that are memory mapped will use a few megabytes of ram as the current portion of video is paged in. It will show 4GB of memory used in pretty much every tool. Chrome suffers from this as browsers work with lots of media that may or may not need access as the page is scrolled around. Using the mechanism all OSs have to deal with this (memory mapping) will report GB of ram used. But it will still be responsive! It's not actually using that much RAM! I see so many comments along the lines of 'chrome reports xGB of ram usage when I open tabs. You can't get by with 8GB of ram!!!!' yet the computer will be running smoothly. Just as my old iPad with 256MB of ram runs smoothly with those same tabs open in chrome. You might need more than 8GB but please don't try to claim people can't do the basics with only 8GB. I have an 8gb MacBook Air as a lounge PC. A PC used for the basics when I couldn't be bothered firing up the big gaming rig. Unsurprisingly the 8gb laptop is better than my still perfectly capable 256mb ram iPad running the same apps although the iPad was still decent at the role in any case. The claims that 8GB is completely useless and can't even do web browsing because Chrome shows 8gb ram usage is so obviously stupid and false. Many are probably reading such claims on a portable device running the same browser with less RAM. Yet media and even tech sites are posting this crap repeatedly.
albertopv 3y ago
It was paging a lot I guess, any metrics about it?

I had 50+ tabs opened on my M1 8/256GB as a dev while running an IDE and a few local servers. It was fine. I hardly think that the general mass has problems with Chrome on a 8/256 Apple Silicon Mac.

calciphus 3y ago

If we are doing anecdotes, a single tab Google doc with Grammarly running can easily surpass 4Gb of ram, especially if the doc is over about 30 pages. Use cases like that are not particularly uncommon.

aurareturn 3y ago
But did it affect the overall user experience? I was a heavy Google Docs user myself on my 8/256 M1 Air.
AnotherGoodName 3y ago
It's not actually using 4gb of ram. Pretty much every memory reporting tool cannot handle paging and will report total allocated. You can create a one line c program today that just calls mmap(file) on a large 4gb media file and your os will claim 4gb used. Actually measuring real physical ram usage is hard. I'd be looking for page table misses (and the likely noticable resulting performance issues) as a better indication of any potential issues.

AnotherGoodName 3y ago

Yep one thing in this discussion is that people have no idea how to read memory usage. A 4GB set of videos that are memory mapped will use a few megabytes of ram as the current portion of video is paged in. It will show 4GB of memory used in pretty much every tool. Chrome suffers from this as browsers work with lots of media that may or may not need access as the page is scrolled around. Using the mechanism all OSs have to deal with this (memory mapping) will report GB of ram used. But it will still be responsive! It's not actually using that much RAM! I see so many comments along the lines of 'chrome reports xGB of ram usage when I open tabs. You can't get by with 8GB of ram!!!!' yet the computer will be running smoothly. Just as my old iPad with 256MB of ram runs smoothly with those same tabs open in chrome. You might need more than 8GB but please don't try to claim people can't do the basics with only 8GB. I have an 8gb MacBook Air as a lounge PC. A PC used for the basics when I couldn't be bothered firing up the big gaming rig. Unsurprisingly the 8gb laptop is better than my still perfectly capable 256mb ram iPad running the same apps although the iPad was still decent at the role in any case. The claims that 8GB is completely useless and can't even do web browsing because Chrome shows 8gb ram usage is so obviously stupid and false. Many are probably reading such claims on a portable device running the same browser with less RAM. Yet media and even tech sites are posting this crap repeatedly.

albertopv 3y ago

It was paging a lot I guess, any metrics about it?