People use what they have, I won’t blame them for it. (Although the notion that web apps—such as Facebook, GMail, Google Docs, or PDF.js—are less resource-intensive than “normal” desktop usage does not seem to hold much water to me, and those are usually included when a machine is said to be used “just for web browsing”. So if the experience ends up quite miserable I won’t be surprised.) But I’ve shopped for a laptop for a relative some months ago and am a bit testy about how manufacturers seem to be saving money on frickin’ RAM (or more realistically segmenting the market using it). Just... don’t fall for it if you have a choice.
Leaving aside everything else, how is that even relevant? Even cheap laptops have 8gigs of ram these days, most have 16. Considering the browser is becoming the de-facto single application used at all for most people, what else would they need their ram for?
In what planet? I'm not even going to use myself as an example because I do other heavy stuff with my PC, I'm going to use my non-tech friends: one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system.
Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience. That's not a problem in mobile where the need is the mother of invention so mem management is automatic and chrome reopens the tabs you had by itself, but in a desktop environment (specially windows) one wrong click and the session restore in chrome wipes your previous session.
But it was cheap, cheaper than an unlocked iphone and it gets the job done so its ok for her.
Yes. In college I had many tabs and many word documents open, a few IDEs, horribly inefficient LMS or video sharing sites, and massive lecture videos. Maybe a few chat apps to keep in touch with classmates.
If you’ve used google chrome with messenger dot com, that’s already eating into the ram budget a good amount.
But then you can't even browse the web properly with these, though. Not with all those fat Javascript-heavy pages and the whole "RAM is cheap" prevailing development mentality nowadays.
I don't question that their web-apps are good. I also didn't imply the native applications were any good.
But there is absolutely no reason for a mail client or calendar to use gigabytes of RAM and have significant impact on battery life. Which is bound to happen if you bundle Chromium et al. and run the webapps in it.
Well, my point more was apps/sites that go sideways will eat as much RAM as they're allowed to. The 20 GB case was only special in that the leak rate was much higher than most. On a smaller scale, whenever my laptop fan kicked on, I knew I left a Travis tab open in the background somewhere. That was the CPU going into an aggressive GC loop due to the relatively huge amount of memory being used (2 - 4 GB).
But my original point is really that dismissing gross memory usage by saying you can buy more RAM for cheap is no longer accurate. In many cases, your machine's configuration is unchangeable. Getting an extra 2 GB RAM isn't $30, it's the cost of a brand new device. In other cases, where you might have configurable hardware, you often have to buy the largest capacity chip available and the economics get skewed. For SODIMMS, going 8 GB -> 16 GB is reasonably cheap, 16 GB -> 32 GB is fairly expensive.
I'd argue having to do a hardware upgrade for a web app in the first place is a bit silly. There's often very little reason for these apps to be so large in the first place.
Dunno man, I'm actually using it right now and with 4 tabs open it's using 1.3 gb of RAM. These websites aren't specially heavy either, none of them it's Facebook or another social network.
They may not care about how much RAM it is using, but the blatant disregard for resource usage manifests in other ways. Most people I know are just resigned to believe their 4GB RAM laptop will be obsolete in a few years. When things "get slow" it means chuck the whole computer. I do think that the recklessness to which we use our virtual resources contributes to e-waste, which is a physical problem.
Memory consumption and speed are apparently not important for you then, and that's fair enough. To each their own. I can only use so many resource hogs before my laptop says no. It starts with battery life and memory consumption. Speed (and benchmarks) is a good early warning sign.
If I have the ram.. why not use it? Putty and Outlook can sop up the remains, but the bulk of my memory is either going to be used for my browser.. or wasted. High numbers of tabs certainly isn't a usage pattern that is for everybody.. but clearly there are many of us who use it.
Not quite. Only nerds like us notice that apps use gigabytes of ram. Everyone notices when apps are slow, especially when the system goes to the page file.
8GB of ram is very typical being the base spec in most laptops today.
My laptop has 2GB RAM. Firefox takes up about a quarter of it on average, Emacs is about 10-100MB, the system (Xubuntu) seems to take up about a GB, and what remains is indeed a few hundred megabytes. This means that I can run half an Electron app at a time on my machine. And normal people don't have more than 4-8MBs of ram on their computers. And high CPU and RAM usage drains battery, and most people are on laptops nowadays. So RAM and CPU use is still a thing for users. If anybody thinks otherwise, that's probably because they're in their bubble of hackers and have only a guesstimate about an ordinary user's use of a computer.
What websites need that much RAM? Even reddit's redesign is only using up 200mb in firefox for me at the moment. Spotify's desktop app is using 500mb - which I'll grant is pretty wasteful given its not even playing music. Honestly, 8gb of ram is fine for an awful lot of people. Why should regular users need more ram?
Even assuming software (like Teams) does chew up users' RAM, the idea that we should push that problem onto the consumer is backwards. Instead of asking consumers to pay more for their devices, developers should just stop being so lazy with our software.
My mum shouldn't need to buy a new laptop every few years if her computing needs don't change. Its sloppy and wasteful.
But the performance is worse. I point out the example of a small spreadsheet. Open it in Google sheets, and you are using 1/2 gigs+ in ram plus heavy cpu. Open it in a desktop app maybe you will use 20 to 30 mb of ram, and low cpu usage.
8 gigabytes is not enough to run Windows. It ok for an iPad, but any Windows computer with 8GB ram essentially unusable and will crawl to a halt the second you open a web browser.
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