3 ms·

Don't these integrated ARM-based SoCs make much better use of RAM as opposed to old Intel-based boards? That's my understanding, anyway.

2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago
The benefits are in speed not capacity.
wincy 7mo ago
My wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!)
- nozzlegear 7mo ago
  So Firefox was using 5gb? There's your problem.
  - wincy 7mo ago
    It’s a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I’ll get her a 64GB MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she so desires!
    - qudat 7mo ago
      Tabs as bookmarks, people keep falling into this trap, my wife included
      - nozzlegear 7mo ago
        I do it myself and I'm sure a lot of people on HN do too. But I've tried to embrace the "zen" of closing all tabs lately and it's been nice. If I really want to find something later I can search my history or, like you said, just bookmark it.
    - astrange 7mo ago
      She shouldn't have to do anything. That's the browser's job.
    - mkl 7mo ago
      Auto Tab Discard: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... I have a Firefox window with 3500 tabs right now.
  - cloudier1 7mo ago
    What page? Azure portal is notorious for leaking memory in both chrome and firefox, that’s the only tab I’ve seen using 5+ gb ram.
    - cromka 7mo ago
      Is it leaking or is it by design? As far as I remember Azure site is just all of the pages combined in one single massive DOM.
- astrange 7mo ago
  If you mean it showed the out of memory dialog, that wouldn't be caused by an app using 3GB. The dialog shows up at ~48GB swap space used on an 8GB Mac, or when you're out of disk space and can't write a swap file.
dawnerd 7mo ago
More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping like that was destroying their drives really fast.

2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago

The benefits are in speed not capacity.

wincy 7mo ago

My wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!)

nozzlegear 7mo ago
So Firefox was using 5gb? There's your problem.
- wincy 7mo ago
  It’s a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I’ll get her a 64GB MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she so desires!
  - qudat 7mo ago
    Tabs as bookmarks, people keep falling into this trap, my wife included
    - nozzlegear 7mo ago
      I do it myself and I'm sure a lot of people on HN do too. But I've tried to embrace the "zen" of closing all tabs lately and it's been nice. If I really want to find something later I can search my history or, like you said, just bookmark it.
  - astrange 7mo ago
    She shouldn't have to do anything. That's the browser's job.
  - mkl 7mo ago
    Auto Tab Discard: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... I have a Firefox window with 3500 tabs right now.
- cloudier1 7mo ago
  What page? Azure portal is notorious for leaking memory in both chrome and firefox, that’s the only tab I’ve seen using 5+ gb ram.
  - cromka 7mo ago
    Is it leaking or is it by design? As far as I remember Azure site is just all of the pages combined in one single massive DOM.
astrange 7mo ago
If you mean it showed the out of memory dialog, that wouldn't be caused by an app using 3GB. The dialog shows up at ~48GB swap space used on an 8GB Mac, or when you're out of disk space and can't write a swap file.

dawnerd 7mo ago

More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping like that was destroying their drives really fast.