Title. Besides setting tmpfs to use 10GiB of it to store downloads.
Run not one, but two electron based apps? 😅
All jokes aside, most desktop apps and web browsers, nowadays, use ungodly amounts of RAM. The pessimist in me blames Chrome and electron, but in reality it just comes down to programmers being more accustom to having access to more memory than they need.
I say relax and enjoy the lack of slowdowns - having too much RAM is not a problem, but having too little is. Your only concern should ever be trying to avoid the latter, and with 32gb of RAM you should be good until the next big Discord update. (slight /s on that last point)
I recently upgraded my RAM because it was wild how much was being used. I have to eat the cost of more RAM because sites don’t seem to minimize it at all.
RAM is the kind of thing you’re better off having too much than not enough. Worst case the OS ends up with a very healthy and large file cache, which frees up your storage and makes things a bit faster/lets it spend the CPU on other things. If anything, your machine is future proofed against the ever increasing RAM hungriness of web apps. But if you run out of it, you get apps killed, hangs or major slowdowns as it hits the swap.
The thing with RAM is that it’s easy for 99% of your workload to fit comfortably, and then there’s one thing you temporarily need a bit more and you’re screwed. My machine usually uses 8-12/32GB of RAM but yet I still ended up needing to add swap to my machine. Just opening up the Lemmy source code and spinning up the Rust LSP can use a solid 8+GB alone. I’ve compiled some AUR packages that needed more than 16GB of RAM. I have 16 cores so compiling anything with -j32 can very quickly bring down a machine to its knees even if each compile thread is only using like 256-512MB each.
Another example: my netbook has 8GB. 99% of the time it’s fine, because it’s a web browsing machine, and I probably average on 4GB usage on a heavy day with lots of tabs open. But if I open up VSCode and use any LSP be it TypeScript or Rust, the machine immediately starts swapping aggressively. I had to log out of my graphical session to compile Lemmy, barely.
RAM is cheap enough these days it’s nice to have more than you need to not ever have to worry about it.
I have 64GB as future proofing (ITX board, two slots, can’t address any more). Normally I probably use 8 to 10 of those doing things like gaming and hoarding internet tabs like they’re a nonrenewable resource. I actually managed to crash my machine with an out of memory condition compiling something a while back. I don’t remember what and I’m sure it doesn’t count as regular use but I installed ZRAM to prevent it from happening again.
Run your web browser from RAM for faster browsing.
2 Chrome tabs at the same time!
With the rate at which Electron applications catch on? Nothing, you’ll end up using it all in a few years time.
Was just gonna say this. Run discord and slack, and you’re all set.
Nothing. My laptop has 8GB and while this is somewhat the limit, it’s enough to browse, do office stuff, a bit of development/programming and even a bit of CAD for my 3D printer, video editing, retro-gaming and all sorts of things. I’d prefer to have 16GB because Firefox likes to eat a lot of RAM, but the laptop is too old for me to upgrade anything at this point.
If you’d like to waste your resources, you could run 4 other operating systems simultaneously in VMs. Or try artificial intelligence chatbots and load one of the large language models. They can easily make use of 32GB of memory and more.
Agreed. I have ageing hardware that I upgraded to its maximum 16GB RAM, and I manage to browse the web and do basic office work with that. The most memory intensive work I do beside browsing is in GIMP, and I simply set some sensible virtual memory for that to work.
Just use a light DE, or even scale back to only a WM. People insisting that KDE or Gnome are lightweight are exactly the same who claim that 32GB RAM is a minimum. Yeah, it is when even your desktop environment is bloated 🙄
If you’re a gamer and can afford the hardware upgrades to stay at the current bleeding edge, go ahead. I keep an old box alive and make it work instead.
I have 16 gigs of ddr4 sodimms so if you happen to live close enough (unlikely) and need ddr4 i’d be willing to give it to you for free
Virtualize fun things for projects
Heh, I’ve got 32gb on my Proxmox box, and would be lying if I said I wasn’t eyeballing a few 64 or 128 sticks.
I second that, install cockpit if you don’t want to bother with the CLI and run a couple of VMs. You can even start 3 VMs and install Kubernetes on them and play with it.
Open 4 browser tabs
jokes aside, you’re getting benefits from more caching into ram, and you’re also getting the ability to not have to even think about your ram usage, even if the ram isn’t actively being used by apps you’re getting good use just from having it available, the OS has more wiggle room to use it optimally: I have 64GB of ram and regularly use only about 12-20GB of it, currently 6.1GB is being used as cache
Some apps like Okular (pdf viewer) can be configured to use more ram in the settings, you can set it to be very aggressive about preloading pages so that everything loads faster, set a very high amount of scrollback in your terminal if wanted, etc
I’ve never done this so I can’t speak to how much benefit there is from it, but you can set up a way to preload/cache your most used apps into ram, so that they’re always fully loaded and ready to go
Self host some stuff.
Just wait. In 10 years 32 gig is on the low side to just run the OS. Hardware getest faster and bigger, but software scales with it.
The more resources are available, the more people will program computers to use them.
My first graphics card had 128mb memory. These days it goes in gigabyte and they use the memory and processing power to produce amazing things.
On the other hand, they also are not as critical on efficiëncy as used to be, because there are simply more resources available anyway. As a consequence, some programs use a silly amount of resources for basically doing nothing. Sometimes I really feel like my browser is eating RAM…
After boot, I’m using 2GB. I haven’t noticed Linux doing the ram-hog thing like Windows at all. But Firefox is currently using 8GB.
Just restarted Firefox and it’s using 2.5GB now. I think it stores a lot in ram from video.
unused RAM is wasted RAM
Average web developer principle
A program that can run on 1GB but uses 2GB is more wasteful, OS and FS level caching and memory reclamation only work if the memory is available, and a program wasting it takes it from everything else, unused RAM is wasted, but so is RAM being used for no actual function.
Not to say programs cant use large amounts, but they should provide a level of functionality for the amount of memory used, and some programs of late have been more than a bit inefficient, in short, filling the RAM is good, but do make sure its actually being used.
That means you should waste and occupy as much as possible? Lol.
I think less of anyone who treats ‘sayings’ like that as absolute fact. Small minds.
How? After booting(and starting DE) I’m using about 700 megs.
My DE is Gnome which uses a bit. Haven’t really looked into it further, because I still have 62GB of ram free after startx. Haven’t maxed it out yet.
I remember when system memory was measured in KB…
Fuck, I’m old.
Yeah, that day when you got your first whole MB of RAM… I remember mine was on SIPP chips.
I have a machine with 1gb of ram. I can browse the web and everything
Nothing. Don’t make up problems for your hardware, lol.
I’m guessing you listened to someone who didn’t know what they were talking about.
Mount your .cache dirs into memory via tmpfs
Does it improve performance in any way? Seems a bit obvious, but I’ll ask anyways for the sake of curiosity.
yes.
Yes, and if you have an ssd, it will decrease the amount of usage that the limited(albeit ridiculously high) read/write cycles the ssd is capable of. However, it is unlikely you will hit those limits with that kind of usage, lol
Also, memory is faster always, but your usage is negligible. You can disable swap(linux/mac) or page file(windows) to force memory to be used, and your drive is used less. Firefox can be configured to disable disk cache and increase ram cache. Also, it will be noted that this cache is marked as temporary ram cache. any application that needs more ram can delete the temp cache for usage(dynamic ram usage)
But that’s it. The best thing to do is live your life and be happy that you are future proofed for any task that may arise.
“just browse the internet” doesn’t indicate that you don’t need a powerful computer in 2023. Modern browsers are really heavy - and rendering websites are much more complex now.
Unless you’re really frugal about your PC budget, I think it’s definitely “to-go” for 32G
Here’s a little script I’ve put in my $PATH, called
memsum:#!/usr/bin/bash /usr/bin/ps -eo rss,command --sort -rss | egrep $1 | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; sum +=hr} END {print sum}'Now you can go:
memsum firefoxormemsum whateverand see that, actually, apps use a ridiculous amount of memory these days.I can get Firefox up to 8GB by using things like Office 365.
Browsers often use a lot of unreserved memory marked as free for whoever wants it. This is how you get 16GB browser sessions.
Thanks for this, it’s so easy to just run this script when I’m curious.
I got the warning “egrep: warning: egrep is obsolescent; using grep -E” so I just swapped that command to get rid of the message.
Use it for caching more stuff to make your system even faster, virtualization and most importantly, browsers
