4 ms·

People are never going to understand RAM, but once more, for the cheap seats: It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for

People are never going to understand RAM, but once more, for the cheap seats: It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again.

gruez 2y ago
>It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again. It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. If you bought a system with 16 GB of ram, and the system just decided to eat 15GB of that for its own opaque purposes, leaving 1GB for your workloads, you'd be pretty miffed as well.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. It is and this is the thing that people -- even software engineers -- usually misunderstand. Evicting cached data is for all intents and purposes a zero cost operation. That's why modern operating systems cache aggressively when they're not busy doing anything else: there's really no downside. If I'm caching file xyz.dll, and it turns out xyz.dll isn't needed, it's not like I have to write it back to disk or do any other (significant) work to evict it from the cache. So yes: that memory is available, at no additional cost, for any reasonable definition of "available" and "no additional cost." Honestly, why do so many just assume that the core OS kernel devs at multiple zillion-dollar companies get this fundamental Operating Systems 101 thing so spectacularly wrong in modern OSs?
  - encoderer 2y ago
    Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Still doesn’t get RAM. RAM will never be understood.
    - hagbard_c 2y ago
      > Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Us vs. them based on 'karma' gives me bad vibes. If anything the fact that 'high-karma' users don't grasp low-level operating systems mechanics is a tell-tale sign of what it takes to get high up in the karma ladder. Better to keep that karma for what it is - a semi-functional means to keep out the trolls - and focus on the message instead of the messenger.
      - encoderer 2y ago
        I mean he hangs out here a lot.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Dalewyn 2y ago
>It’s not gone! It’s there! The sheer prevalence of memory leaks means that is a lie more often than not.

People are never going to understand RAM, but once more, for the cheap seats: It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again.

gruez 2y ago

>It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again. It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. If you bought a system with 16 GB of ram, and the system just decided to eat 15GB of that for its own opaque purposes, leaving 1GB for your workloads, you'd be pretty miffed as well.

JohnBooty 2y ago
It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. It is and this is the thing that people -- even software engineers -- usually misunderstand. Evicting cached data is for all intents and purposes a zero cost operation. That's why modern operating systems cache aggressively when they're not busy doing anything else: there's really no downside. If I'm caching file xyz.dll, and it turns out xyz.dll isn't needed, it's not like I have to write it back to disk or do any other (significant) work to evict it from the cache. So yes: that memory is available, at no additional cost, for any reasonable definition of "available" and "no additional cost." Honestly, why do so many just assume that the core OS kernel devs at multiple zillion-dollar companies get this fundamental Operating Systems 101 thing so spectacularly wrong in modern OSs?
- encoderer 2y ago
  Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Still doesn’t get RAM. RAM will never be understood.
  - hagbard_c 2y ago
    > Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Us vs. them based on 'karma' gives me bad vibes. If anything the fact that 'high-karma' users don't grasp low-level operating systems mechanics is a tell-tale sign of what it takes to get high up in the karma ladder. Better to keep that karma for what it is - a semi-functional means to keep out the trolls - and focus on the message instead of the messenger.
    - encoderer 2y ago
      I mean he hangs out here a lot.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Dalewyn 2y ago

>It’s not gone! It’s there! The sheer prevalence of memory leaks means that is a lie more often than not.