6 ms·

I'm always confused as hell how little insight we have in memory consumption. I look at memory profiles of rnomal apps and often think "what is burning that me

I'm always confused as hell how little insight we have in memory consumption. I look at memory profiles of rnomal apps and often think "what is burning that memory". Modern compression works so well, whats happening? Open your taskmaster and look through apps and you might ask yourself this. For example (lets ignore chrome, ms teams and all the other bloat) sublime consumes 200mb. I have 4 text files open. What is it doing? Alone for chrome to implement tab suspend took YEARS despite everyone being aware of the issue. And addons existed which were able to do this. I bought more ram just for chrome...

Orygin 7mo ago
200Mb for Sublime does not seem so bad when compared to Postman using 4Gb on my machine...
veunes 7mo ago
Part of the problem is that modern apps aren't really "one thing" anymore
senfiaj 7mo ago
It's partly because there are layers of abstractions (frameworks, libraries / runtimes / VM, etc). Also, today's software often has other pressures, like development time, maintainability, security, robustness, accessibility, portability (OS / CPU architecture), etc. It's partly because the complexity / demand has increased. https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-is-ok https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...
gwbas1c 7mo ago
Basically, the short answer is that most memory managers allocate more memory than a process needs, and then reuse it. IE, in a JVM (Java) or dotnet (C#) process, the garbage collector allocates some memory from the operating system and keeps reusing it as it finds free memory and the program needs it. These systems are built with the assumption that RAM is cheap and CPU cycles aren't, so they are highly optimized CPU-wise, but otherwise are RAM inefficient.
pjc50 7mo ago
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/vmmap https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/vmm... for an empty sublime text window gives me: - 100MB 'image' (ie executable code; the executable itself plus all the OS libraries loaded.) - 40MB heap - 50MB "mapped file", mostly fonts opened with mmap() or the windows equivalent - 45MB stack (each thread gets 2MB) - 40MB "shareable" (no idea) - 5MB "unusable" (appears to be address space that's not usable because of fragmentation, not actual RAM) Generally if something's using a lot of RAM, the answer will be bitmaps of various sorts: draw buffers, decompressed textures, fonts, other graphical assets, and so on. In this case it's just allocated but not yet used heap+stacks, plus 100MB for the code. Edit: I may be underestimating the role of binary code size. Visual Studio "devenv.exe" is sitting at 2GB of 'image'. Zoom is 500MB. VSCode is 300MB. Much of which are app-specific, not just Windows DLLs.
- Capricorn2481 7mo ago
  But I have sublime text open with a hundred files and it's using 12mb.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    And how does that breakdown in vmmap? I'm guessing that's working set vs. the whole virtual memory allocation (which is definitely always an overestimate and not the same as RAM)
    - wild_egg 7mo ago
      Virtual memory doesn't matter at all. It's virtual. You can take 2TB of address space, use 5MB of it, and nothing on the system cares.
- muskstinks 7mo ago
  Tx for the breakdown. I will play around with it later on my windows machine. But isn't it crazy how we throw out so much memory just because of random buffers? It feels wrong to me
Capricorn2481 7mo ago
> sublime consumes 200mb. I have 4 text files open. What is it doing? Huh? Sublime Text? I have like 100 files open and it uses 12mb. Sublime is extremely lean. Do you have plugins installed?
- muskstinks 7mo ago
  I do not have plugins installed and i have only a handful of files open on macos. Memroy statistics says 200mb and a peak of 750mb in the past (for whatever reason)
  - Capricorn2481 7mo ago
    Is that in Task Manager, or is that not a reliable place to look for these statistics? Edit: From what I can tell, Sublime is allocated 100mb of virtual memory even if it's only using about 10mb in practice.
    - Twirrim 7mo ago
      A lot of programs over-allocate on virtual memory, but don't actually use it, and the OS is smart enough to just pretend like it allocated it. I'm sure there's probably some justification for it somewhere, but it's hard not to see it as some absurd organically achieved agreement. Developers used to ask for more memory than their application actually needed and caused all sorts of OOM problems for end users. OS developers realised this and made the OS lie to the app to tell it it got what it asked for, and only give it memory as needed. Now developers just can't be bothered to set any realistic amount of memory, because what's the point, the OS is going to ignore it anyway. Electron really loves to claim absurd amounts of memory, e.g. slack has claimed just over 1TB of virtual memory, but is only using just north of 200MB.
      - astrange 7mo ago
        There is literally no reason to care how much "virtual memory" you're using - pointers are 64-bit after all. (Well, 48 bits.) Exceptions apply on Windows for reasons I forget, and on watchOS because there isn't enough memory for the page tables for really big VM regions.
inetknght 7mo ago
> I look at memory profiles of rnomal apps and often think "what is burning that memory". As a corrolary to this: I look at CPU utilization graphs. Programs are completely idle. "What is burning all that CPU?!" I remember using a computer with RAM measured in two-digit amounts of MiB. CPU measured in low hundreds of MHz. It felt just as fast -- sometimes faster -- as modern computers. Where is all of that extra RAM being used?! Where is all of that extra performance going?! There's no need for it!
- HPsquared 7mo ago
  Work expands to fill the available time. This applies to CPU time just as it does to project management.
- ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
  Next time you see someone on HN blithely post "CPU / RAM is cheaper than developer time", it's them. That is the sort of coder who are collectively wasting our CPU and RAM.
  - anthk 7mo ago
    Even an editor running under Inferno plus Inferno itself would be lighter than the current editors by large. And that with the VM being weighted on. And Limbo it's a somewhat high level language...
  - shepherdjerred 7mo ago
    If you ran a business, would you rather your devs work on feature X that could bring in Y revenue, or spend that same time reducing CPU/RAM/storage utilization by Z% and gives the benefit of ???
    - kardos 7mo ago
      There is probably some low hanging fruit to be harvested in terms of memory optimizations, and it could be a selling point for the next while as the memory shortage persists
ben-schaaf 7mo ago
Completely agree, it would be very helpful to get even just a breakdown of what the ram is being used for. It's unfortunately a lot of work to instrument. > sublime consumes 200mb. I have 4 text files open. What is it doing? To add to what others have said: Depending on the platform a good amount will be the system itself, various buffers and caches. If you have a folder open in the side bar, Sublime Text will track and index all the files in there. There's also no limit to undo history that is kept in RAM. There's also the possibility that that 200MB includes the subprocesses, meaning the two python plugin hosts and any processes your plugins spawn - which can include heavy LSP servers.
pjmlp 7mo ago
It is a matter of tooling. Visual Studio runs the memory profiler in debug mode right from the start, it is the default configuration, you need to disable it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/profiling/memory-usage?view=visualstudio https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/profiling/mem...
toss1 7mo ago
>>I'm always confused as hell how little insight we have in memory consumption. >>I look at memory profiles of rnomal apps and often think "what is burning that memory". Because companies starting with Microsoft approach it as an infinite resource, and have done so literally for generations of programmers — it is now ancient tradition. Back in the x86 days when both memory and memory handles were constrained (64k of them, iirc) I went to a MS developer conference. One problem starting to plague everyone was users' computers running out of memory when actual memory in use was less than half, and the problem was not that memory was used, but all available handles were consumed. I randomly ended up talking to the (at the time) leader of the Excel team, so I thought I'd ask him about good practices, asking "Does it make sense to have the software look at the task and make an estimate of the full amount of RAM required and allocate it off one handle and track our usage ourselves within that block?" I was speechless when he answered: "Sure, if you wanted to optimize the snot out of it — we just allocate another handle." That two-line answer just blew my mind and instantly explained so much about problems I saw at the time, and since. It also made sense in the context of another talk they gave at a previous conference where the message was they anticipate the increased power of the next generation of hardware and write their new version for that hardware, not the then-current hardware. It makes sense, but in the new light, it seems almost like a cousin of planned obsolescence — "How can we squander all the new power Intel is giving us?". And the result was decades after word processing and spreadsheets had usable performance on 640K DOS machines, new machines with orders of magnitude more power and RAM, actually run slower from a user perspective. I'm hoping this memory crunch (having postponed a memory upgrade for my daily driver and now noticing it is 10x the price) will at least have the benefit of driving developers to maybe get back some craft of designing in optimization.
- Melatonic 7mo ago
  Software engineers seem to be more and more abstracted from the hardware they use. You also (rarely) back in the day had to worry about things like IRQ ports and optimising for tiny amounts of latency. Personally I am fine with programmers not spending tons of time optimising down to every last piece because we do have so much more ram and compute relative to the old days. My bigger issue is that things are also a laggy mess even when there is plenty of resources available. I understand these things go hand in hand but I would much rather see more optimisations for the things users will actually notice than just going for metrics. A nice combo of the two would be ideal. That being said what's probably most appalling is the amount some modern programs hard crash even when they have plenty of resources.
corysama 7mo ago
Some ten years ago I used an earlier version of https://unity.com/how-to/analyze-memory-usage-memory-profiling-tools https://unity.com/how-to/analyze-memory-usage-memory-profili... to accidentally discover a memory leak that was due to some 3rd party code with a lambda that captured an ancient, archived version of Microsoft's C# vector which had a bug. There were multiple layers of impossibility of me finding that through inspection. But, with a functional tool, it was obvious. Ten years before that I worked on a bespoke commercial game engine that had its own memory tracker. First thing we did with it was fire up a demo program, attach the memory analyzer to it, then attach a second instance of the memory analyzer to the first one and found a memory error in the memory analyzer. Now that I'm out of gamedev, I feel like I'm working completely blind. People barely acknowledge the existence of debuggers. I don't know how y'all get anything to work. A quick google for open-source C++ solutions turns up https://github.com/RudjiGames/MTuner https://github.com/RudjiGames/MTuner which happens to have been updated today. From a game developer, of course XD
BiteCode_dev 7mo ago
rnomal ?
koverstreet 7mo ago
I did memory allocation profile for the Linux kernel. Sure would be nice if we had the same capabilities in userspace.

Orygin 7mo ago

200Mb for Sublime does not seem so bad when compared to Postman using 4Gb on my machine...

veunes 7mo ago

Part of the problem is that modern apps aren't really "one thing" anymore

senfiaj 7mo ago

It's partly because there are layers of abstractions (frameworks, libraries / runtimes / VM, etc). Also, today's software often has other pressures, like development time, maintainability, security, robustness, accessibility, portability (OS / CPU architecture), etc. It's partly because the complexity / demand has increased. https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-is-ok https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...

gwbas1c 7mo ago

Basically, the short answer is that most memory managers allocate more memory than a process needs, and then reuse it. IE, in a JVM (Java) or dotnet (C#) process, the garbage collector allocates some memory from the operating system and keeps reusing it as it finds free memory and the program needs it. These systems are built with the assumption that RAM is cheap and CPU cycles aren't, so they are highly optimized CPU-wise, but otherwise are RAM inefficient.

pjc50 7mo ago

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/vmmap https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/vmm... for an empty sublime text window gives me: - 100MB 'image' (ie executable code; the executable itself plus all the OS libraries loaded.) - 40MB heap - 50MB "mapped file", mostly fonts opened with mmap() or the windows equivalent - 45MB stack (each thread gets 2MB) - 40MB "shareable" (no idea) - 5MB "unusable" (appears to be address space that's not usable because of fragmentation, not actual RAM) Generally if something's using a lot of RAM, the answer will be bitmaps of various sorts: draw buffers, decompressed textures, fonts, other graphical assets, and so on. In this case it's just allocated but not yet used heap+stacks, plus 100MB for the code. Edit: I may be underestimating the role of binary code size. Visual Studio "devenv.exe" is sitting at 2GB of 'image'. Zoom is 500MB. VSCode is 300MB. Much of which are app-specific, not just Windows DLLs.

Capricorn2481 7mo ago
But I have sublime text open with a hundred files and it's using 12mb.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  And how does that breakdown in vmmap? I'm guessing that's working set vs. the whole virtual memory allocation (which is definitely always an overestimate and not the same as RAM)
  - wild_egg 7mo ago
    Virtual memory doesn't matter at all. It's virtual. You can take 2TB of address space, use 5MB of it, and nothing on the system cares.
muskstinks 7mo ago
Tx for the breakdown. I will play around with it later on my windows machine. But isn't it crazy how we throw out so much memory just because of random buffers? It feels wrong to me

Capricorn2481 7mo ago

> sublime consumes 200mb. I have 4 text files open. What is it doing? Huh? Sublime Text? I have like 100 files open and it uses 12mb. Sublime is extremely lean. Do you have plugins installed?

muskstinks 7mo ago
I do not have plugins installed and i have only a handful of files open on macos. Memroy statistics says 200mb and a peak of 750mb in the past (for whatever reason)
- Capricorn2481 7mo ago
  Is that in Task Manager, or is that not a reliable place to look for these statistics? Edit: From what I can tell, Sublime is allocated 100mb of virtual memory even if it's only using about 10mb in practice.
  - Twirrim 7mo ago
    A lot of programs over-allocate on virtual memory, but don't actually use it, and the OS is smart enough to just pretend like it allocated it. I'm sure there's probably some justification for it somewhere, but it's hard not to see it as some absurd organically achieved agreement. Developers used to ask for more memory than their application actually needed and caused all sorts of OOM problems for end users. OS developers realised this and made the OS lie to the app to tell it it got what it asked for, and only give it memory as needed. Now developers just can't be bothered to set any realistic amount of memory, because what's the point, the OS is going to ignore it anyway. Electron really loves to claim absurd amounts of memory, e.g. slack has claimed just over 1TB of virtual memory, but is only using just north of 200MB.
    - astrange 7mo ago
      There is literally no reason to care how much "virtual memory" you're using - pointers are 64-bit after all. (Well, 48 bits.) Exceptions apply on Windows for reasons I forget, and on watchOS because there isn't enough memory for the page tables for really big VM regions.

inetknght 7mo ago

> I look at memory profiles of rnomal apps and often think "what is burning that memory". As a corrolary to this: I look at CPU utilization graphs. Programs are completely idle. "What is burning all that CPU?!" I remember using a computer with RAM measured in two-digit amounts of MiB. CPU measured in low hundreds of MHz. It felt just as fast -- sometimes faster -- as modern computers. Where is all of that extra RAM being used?! Where is all of that extra performance going?! There's no need for it!

HPsquared 7mo ago
Work expands to fill the available time. This applies to CPU time just as it does to project management.
ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
Next time you see someone on HN blithely post "CPU / RAM is cheaper than developer time", it's them. That is the sort of coder who are collectively wasting our CPU and RAM.
- anthk 7mo ago
  Even an editor running under Inferno plus Inferno itself would be lighter than the current editors by large. And that with the VM being weighted on. And Limbo it's a somewhat high level language...
- shepherdjerred 7mo ago
  If you ran a business, would you rather your devs work on feature X that could bring in Y revenue, or spend that same time reducing CPU/RAM/storage utilization by Z% and gives the benefit of ???
  - kardos 7mo ago
    There is probably some low hanging fruit to be harvested in terms of memory optimizations, and it could be a selling point for the next while as the memory shortage persists

ben-schaaf 7mo ago

Completely agree, it would be very helpful to get even just a breakdown of what the ram is being used for. It's unfortunately a lot of work to instrument. > sublime consumes 200mb. I have 4 text files open. What is it doing? To add to what others have said: Depending on the platform a good amount will be the system itself, various buffers and caches. If you have a folder open in the side bar, Sublime Text will track and index all the files in there. There's also no limit to undo history that is kept in RAM. There's also the possibility that that 200MB includes the subprocesses, meaning the two python plugin hosts and any processes your plugins spawn - which can include heavy LSP servers.

pjmlp 7mo ago

It is a matter of tooling. Visual Studio runs the memory profiler in debug mode right from the start, it is the default configuration, you need to disable it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/profiling/memory-usage?view=visualstudio https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/profiling/mem...

toss1 7mo ago

>>I'm always confused as hell how little insight we have in memory consumption. >>I look at memory profiles of rnomal apps and often think "what is burning that memory". Because companies starting with Microsoft approach it as an infinite resource, and have done so literally for generations of programmers — it is now ancient tradition. Back in the x86 days when both memory and memory handles were constrained (64k of them, iirc) I went to a MS developer conference. One problem starting to plague everyone was users' computers running out of memory when actual memory in use was less than half, and the problem was not that memory was used, but all available handles were consumed. I randomly ended up talking to the (at the time) leader of the Excel team, so I thought I'd ask him about good practices, asking "Does it make sense to have the software look at the task and make an estimate of the full amount of RAM required and allocate it off one handle and track our usage ourselves within that block?" I was speechless when he answered: "Sure, if you wanted to optimize the snot out of it — we just allocate another handle." That two-line answer just blew my mind and instantly explained so much about problems I saw at the time, and since. It also made sense in the context of another talk they gave at a previous conference where the message was they anticipate the increased power of the next generation of hardware and write their new version for that hardware, not the then-current hardware. It makes sense, but in the new light, it seems almost like a cousin of planned obsolescence — "How can we squander all the new power Intel is giving us?". And the result was decades after word processing and spreadsheets had usable performance on 640K DOS machines, new machines with orders of magnitude more power and RAM, actually run slower from a user perspective. I'm hoping this memory crunch (having postponed a memory upgrade for my daily driver and now noticing it is 10x the price) will at least have the benefit of driving developers to maybe get back some craft of designing in optimization.

Melatonic 7mo ago
Software engineers seem to be more and more abstracted from the hardware they use. You also (rarely) back in the day had to worry about things like IRQ ports and optimising for tiny amounts of latency. Personally I am fine with programmers not spending tons of time optimising down to every last piece because we do have so much more ram and compute relative to the old days. My bigger issue is that things are also a laggy mess even when there is plenty of resources available. I understand these things go hand in hand but I would much rather see more optimisations for the things users will actually notice than just going for metrics. A nice combo of the two would be ideal. That being said what's probably most appalling is the amount some modern programs hard crash even when they have plenty of resources.

corysama 7mo ago

Some ten years ago I used an earlier version of https://unity.com/how-to/analyze-memory-usage-memory-profiling-tools https://unity.com/how-to/analyze-memory-usage-memory-profili... to accidentally discover a memory leak that was due to some 3rd party code with a lambda that captured an ancient, archived version of Microsoft's C# vector which had a bug. There were multiple layers of impossibility of me finding that through inspection. But, with a functional tool, it was obvious. Ten years before that I worked on a bespoke commercial game engine that had its own memory tracker. First thing we did with it was fire up a demo program, attach the memory analyzer to it, then attach a second instance of the memory analyzer to the first one and found a memory error in the memory analyzer. Now that I'm out of gamedev, I feel like I'm working completely blind. People barely acknowledge the existence of debuggers. I don't know how y'all get anything to work. A quick google for open-source C++ solutions turns up https://github.com/RudjiGames/MTuner https://github.com/RudjiGames/MTuner which happens to have been updated today. From a game developer, of course XD

BiteCode_dev 7mo ago

rnomal ?

koverstreet 7mo ago

I did memory allocation profile for the Linux kernel. Sure would be nice if we had the same capabilities in userspace.