4 ms·

Over the last three years I have purchased base model 8GB M1 MacBook Airs for each of my three daughters and three of my many nieces as they all decided to go t

Over the last three years I have purchased base model 8GB M1 MacBook Airs for each of my three daughters and three of my many nieces as they all decided to go to college nearly simultaneously. It highly likely that MacOS has required the use of virtual memory 0 times since they were all powered on. Unlike the rest of us psychopaths, they don't keep an Avogadro constant's worth of tabs open at all times.

nullindividual 3y ago
Applications only deal with virtual memory as that is all the OS exposes to them. You would need to watch counters/metrics to determine if any hard paging was occurring.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  I know that you know what I meant.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    Nope, did not know what you meant as it appeared to be the wildly spread misunderstanding of what virtual memory is since Microsoft mislabeled the swap file settings in Windows 95 (sorta extends back before that, but eh).
nicce 3y ago
Let's say you have Spotify, Slack, Discord, VSCode for starters up and running. Or even Teams on top of that. 10 year old machine couldn't probably handle that.
- grishka 3y ago
  Is there a good reason to have all these things as separate apps instead of tabs in the browser you have open at all times anyway, and VSCode instead of any non-web-based text editor?
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Do you think they use less ram if they're browser tabs? They're just memory leaks even there.
    - grishka 3y ago
      There's some memory usage that comes from the tab/window itself, but there's also some amount of memory used per each Chromium instance you run. If they're browser tabs, they use your existing browser instance instead of creating their own ones, thus saving memory.
      - nottorp 3y ago
        Don’t know how that helps when a google docs tab starts at 4-500 mb and goes up to 1.5 gb if left unrestarted for weeks…
  - kbolino 3y ago
    With extensions, VSCode is a full-blown IDE, not a mere text editor. IDEs have always been notorious for how bloated they are. Some of the memory is wasted on Electron/JS, and some of it is wasted on the IPC indirection of the language servers, but VSCode seems pretty well optimized for the level of versatility it offers. Eclipse, IDEA, and good old Visual Studio all get really bloated when you throw lots of different languages at them too.
  - nicce 3y ago
    > VSCode instead of any non-web-based text editor? In reality, only a small percentage of the all developers have endless will to configure their editors or be mostly keyboard-based. VSCode works pretty well just by downloading couple extensions.
r00fus 3y ago
Same here - I've bought 5 of these exact devices for family & extended family. All are super happy with their laptop. In fact, my main hobby laptop is an M1 Air (my beast Intel MBP 16" isn't snappy enough - relegated to games).
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  I've got an M1 MBA, M2 MAX MBP, and a 16 inch Intel MBP. I loathe having to use the Intel machine because it's a dog. Runs hot, drains the battery fast, sluggish, not snappy. Even the base M1 is way more pleasant to use. I look forward to the Intel machine reaching EOL.
eviks 3y ago
0 is highly unlikely, what's more likely is you just wouldn't know Besides tabs there are Electron apps that non psychos enjoy from time to time Also memory leaks since it's common to not reboot these laptops for a long time
kbolino 3y ago
Modern operating systems tend to swap out pages pretty aggressively even when memory pressure is light. Keeping hot files in RAM cache can result in a much snappier experience than e.g. dumping the disk cache in favor of a bunch of seldom-used pages from some background service. More RAM will reduce memory pressure ceteris paribus, but may not reduce page swapping as much as one might expect with intuition from older systems.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  The other flip side is we also keep things mapped into memory more often. So that tab you haven't opened in a while will have the media in it memory mapped. It won't actually be loaded in RAM. The mapping just allows it to be more easily loaded if you ever opened that tab again. This leads to users with 'just enough knowledge to be dangerous' looking at total memory allocated and making outlandish claims. "My browser shows 4GB allocated when I open a single tab, you obviously need 128gb minimum for multiple tabs these days" they will say as they post from a mobile device with 256mb of RAM running the exact same browser and which would show the exact same allocation patterns if htop was as easy to access on a phone. So we have this problem where various apps show outlandish ram usage to end users who just don't understand memory allocation. The apps will be snappy and responsive because memory mapping is a really efficient way to not load things like unused browser tabs into memory but they'll ignore the actual high performance and make ridiculous claims that you can't use chrome/safari/edge with 8GB of ram. It's a bit of a losing battle. I've even seen tech sites post articles '8gb isn't enough!!' complete with a screenshot of 'memory allocated' rather than an actual deep dive into page misses and performance issues. If those users actually ran the same memory usage tools on their phone they might be in for a shock. Chrome has the same allocation patterns on phones too and the phones don't have 8gb of ram. Because they simply never had a view that showed '4gb allocated' for a single tab on their phone they think mobile chrome is super special and doesn't need that while their perfectly performance 8gb laptop does. It's super frustrating.
  - kbolino 3y ago
    Actually, 4+ GB of RAM on a smartphone is now pretty standard. In terms of entry-level devices, the iPhone SE has 4 GB, the Galaxy A54 has 6 GB, and the Pixel 7a has 8 GB. There are of course lots of older phones in the wild, but the ones with 1GB or less are pretty sluggish and getting rare.

nullindividual 3y ago

Applications only deal with virtual memory as that is all the OS exposes to them. You would need to watch counters/metrics to determine if any hard paging was occurring.

snakeyjake 3y ago
I know that you know what I meant.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Nope, did not know what you meant as it appeared to be the wildly spread misunderstanding of what virtual memory is since Microsoft mislabeled the swap file settings in Windows 95 (sorta extends back before that, but eh).

nicce 3y ago

Let's say you have Spotify, Slack, Discord, VSCode for starters up and running. Or even Teams on top of that. 10 year old machine couldn't probably handle that.

grishka 3y ago
Is there a good reason to have all these things as separate apps instead of tabs in the browser you have open at all times anyway, and VSCode instead of any non-web-based text editor?
- nottorp 3y ago
  Do you think they use less ram if they're browser tabs? They're just memory leaks even there.
  - grishka 3y ago
    There's some memory usage that comes from the tab/window itself, but there's also some amount of memory used per each Chromium instance you run. If they're browser tabs, they use your existing browser instance instead of creating their own ones, thus saving memory.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      Don’t know how that helps when a google docs tab starts at 4-500 mb and goes up to 1.5 gb if left unrestarted for weeks…
- kbolino 3y ago
  With extensions, VSCode is a full-blown IDE, not a mere text editor. IDEs have always been notorious for how bloated they are. Some of the memory is wasted on Electron/JS, and some of it is wasted on the IPC indirection of the language servers, but VSCode seems pretty well optimized for the level of versatility it offers. Eclipse, IDEA, and good old Visual Studio all get really bloated when you throw lots of different languages at them too.
- nicce 3y ago
  > VSCode instead of any non-web-based text editor? In reality, only a small percentage of the all developers have endless will to configure their editors or be mostly keyboard-based. VSCode works pretty well just by downloading couple extensions.

r00fus 3y ago

Same here - I've bought 5 of these exact devices for family & extended family. All are super happy with their laptop. In fact, my main hobby laptop is an M1 Air (my beast Intel MBP 16" isn't snappy enough - relegated to games).

rootusrootus 3y ago
I've got an M1 MBA, M2 MAX MBP, and a 16 inch Intel MBP. I loathe having to use the Intel machine because it's a dog. Runs hot, drains the battery fast, sluggish, not snappy. Even the base M1 is way more pleasant to use. I look forward to the Intel machine reaching EOL.

eviks 3y ago

0 is highly unlikely, what's more likely is you just wouldn't know Besides tabs there are Electron apps that non psychos enjoy from time to time Also memory leaks since it's common to not reboot these laptops for a long time

kbolino 3y ago

Modern operating systems tend to swap out pages pretty aggressively even when memory pressure is light. Keeping hot files in RAM cache can result in a much snappier experience than e.g. dumping the disk cache in favor of a bunch of seldom-used pages from some background service. More RAM will reduce memory pressure ceteris paribus, but may not reduce page swapping as much as one might expect with intuition from older systems.

AnotherGoodName 3y ago
The other flip side is we also keep things mapped into memory more often. So that tab you haven't opened in a while will have the media in it memory mapped. It won't actually be loaded in RAM. The mapping just allows it to be more easily loaded if you ever opened that tab again. This leads to users with 'just enough knowledge to be dangerous' looking at total memory allocated and making outlandish claims. "My browser shows 4GB allocated when I open a single tab, you obviously need 128gb minimum for multiple tabs these days" they will say as they post from a mobile device with 256mb of RAM running the exact same browser and which would show the exact same allocation patterns if htop was as easy to access on a phone. So we have this problem where various apps show outlandish ram usage to end users who just don't understand memory allocation. The apps will be snappy and responsive because memory mapping is a really efficient way to not load things like unused browser tabs into memory but they'll ignore the actual high performance and make ridiculous claims that you can't use chrome/safari/edge with 8GB of ram. It's a bit of a losing battle. I've even seen tech sites post articles '8gb isn't enough!!' complete with a screenshot of 'memory allocated' rather than an actual deep dive into page misses and performance issues. If those users actually ran the same memory usage tools on their phone they might be in for a shock. Chrome has the same allocation patterns on phones too and the phones don't have 8gb of ram. Because they simply never had a view that showed '4gb allocated' for a single tab on their phone they think mobile chrome is super special and doesn't need that while their perfectly performance 8gb laptop does. It's super frustrating.
- kbolino 3y ago
  Actually, 4+ GB of RAM on a smartphone is now pretty standard. In terms of entry-level devices, the iPhone SE has 4 GB, the Galaxy A54 has 6 GB, and the Pixel 7a has 8 GB. There are of course lots of older phones in the wild, but the ones with 1GB or less are pretty sluggish and getting rare.