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I once read an explanation of memory usage. It boils down to images, if you think about it a PNG file is small but when you decompress that to a native bitmap

I once read an explanation of memory usage. It boils down to images, if you think about it a PNG file is small but when you decompress that to a native bitmap for rendering to a screen, you've suddenly consumed a lot of space. A lot of applications render using the CPU and pass the data to the GPU to display. Now look at a typical page with images, flash (with images inside) all of the scroll and developers that don't optimise their images and then 100MB of data for a single page isn't really a lot. Plus memory usage is the wrong metric, I don't really care how much RAM my applications use, I care about how responsive they are. Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer.

Omniusaspirer 12y ago
It's pretty rare that I want an application to use less ram these days, if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.
- userbinator 12y ago
  Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer. if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it. If every single application behaved like it owned all the memory on your machine, you would have a pretty horrible experience as they'll be basically fighting over what's available and likely hitting the swapfile. On the contrary, I do wish developers would care more about the memory footprint of their applications since they are sharing with all the others. Looking at it this way, optimising performance by using more memory aggressively (and thus reducing the amount of memory other applications can use) seems like a horribly greedy and antisocial way to behave, and thus it makes sense to use as little as feasible to give good performance. (I'm assuming that the use case here is a browser that you have open along with other applications; if you only have a browser running, then it doesn't matter as much.)
  - iopq 12y ago
    I have 16 gigs of RAM. I'd love to see every program use as much RAM usefully as possible. I don't want programs to write temp files to the drive. I want things to be done in RAM as much as possible to avoid wearing out the SSD. In fact, every application DOES behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory.
    - clarry 12y ago
      I have 1 gig of RAM. I'd love to see every program not waste tens or hundreds of megabytes not doing anything useful with it. I don't want programs to cause heavy swapping and slowdowns, I don't want them to crash because they ran out of memory. I want things to be done reasonably efficiently to allow me to do more with the amazing computing power I did not have fifteen years ago, with a better UX. Sadly, a lot of current software does behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. But modern browsers are particularly bad, and it doesn't help that you need the web for so many things today. With browsers I'm not given much choice. > This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory. No, not at all. It's just handing control over to the operating system so paging can be handled transparently and programs can't overwrite each others' memory. Programs still have to acknowledge and respect the fact that memory is a finite resource, and they can't have all of it. That's how it has always been, a virtual address space doesn't change the fact.
      - nnethercote 12y ago
        This discussion sums up one of the great challenges for browser vendors -- satisfying users with wildly different hardware.
      - kalleboo 12y ago
        > I have 1 gig of RAM. Why do you torture yourself like that when another 4 GB costs $15?
        eropple 12y ago

Omniusaspirer 12y ago

It's pretty rare that I want an application to use less ram these days, if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.

userbinator 12y ago
Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer. if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it. If every single application behaved like it owned all the memory on your machine, you would have a pretty horrible experience as they'll be basically fighting over what's available and likely hitting the swapfile. On the contrary, I do wish developers would care more about the memory footprint of their applications since they are sharing with all the others. Looking at it this way, optimising performance by using more memory aggressively (and thus reducing the amount of memory other applications can use) seems like a horribly greedy and antisocial way to behave, and thus it makes sense to use as little as feasible to give good performance. (I'm assuming that the use case here is a browser that you have open along with other applications; if you only have a browser running, then it doesn't matter as much.)
- iopq 12y ago
  I have 16 gigs of RAM. I'd love to see every program use as much RAM usefully as possible. I don't want programs to write temp files to the drive. I want things to be done in RAM as much as possible to avoid wearing out the SSD. In fact, every application DOES behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory.
  - clarry 12y ago
    I have 1 gig of RAM. I'd love to see every program not waste tens or hundreds of megabytes not doing anything useful with it. I don't want programs to cause heavy swapping and slowdowns, I don't want them to crash because they ran out of memory. I want things to be done reasonably efficiently to allow me to do more with the amazing computing power I did not have fifteen years ago, with a better UX. Sadly, a lot of current software does behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. But modern browsers are particularly bad, and it doesn't help that you need the web for so many things today. With browsers I'm not given much choice. > This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory. No, not at all. It's just handing control over to the operating system so paging can be handled transparently and programs can't overwrite each others' memory. Programs still have to acknowledge and respect the fact that memory is a finite resource, and they can't have all of it. That's how it has always been, a virtual address space doesn't change the fact.
    - nnethercote 12y ago
      This discussion sums up one of the great challenges for browser vendors -- satisfying users with wildly different hardware.
    - kalleboo 12y ago
      > I have 1 gig of RAM. Why do you torture yourself like that when another 4 GB costs $15?
      - eropple 12y ago