2. While a couple of hundred megabytes is usually a small portion of the total RAM, it could be a critical share of the free RAM, and this is what matters.
1. Because you've already maxed out your DIMM slots
2. For the cost of upgrading to larger RAM is prohibitive because you have to throw away your existing DIMMs and replace them with new-to-market DIMMs that are extortionate because they've only just appeared
It's cheap and easy to upgrade your laptop from 2GB to 4GB.
It can be expensive to upgrade your laptop from 4GB to 8GB, no matter how cheap the RAM itself is, because you might have to buy a new laptop to accomodate.
It's a much more expensive (and logistically difficult) task to roll out that kind of upgrade across a large hosting environment with hardware purchased over multiple deployments.
The issue is with the processor's cache memory, which is small, typically 64 kiB or so. (The TLB cache is also important.) Even a few hundred bytes savings can give an important improvement in speed amd power consumption.
I'm 100% with you on this, but the real problem is that, while maybe RAM is relatively cheap, the most common computers today, laptops, cannot be arbitrarily upgraded!, and any developer who ignores that is just not doing you a favor.
We call memory a "precious resource" because it is often a fixed quantity in a given computer, and often the most expensive component after the display unit. Many laptops these days do not offer upgradeable memory, and even when they do, they often have very few slots in which to add it. So for many people, an upgrade involves an entire unit replacement at significant cost. I think most people understand this, so again, I don't see how it's particularly controversial.
True about RAM's failure rates being really, really low. But when it fails in such devices, the very expensive option available to you for repair is replacing the whole motherboard! And no easy upgradability means if Windows or Ubuntu tomorrow increases its minimum requirement for RAM to more than 8 GB, you are stuck with sub-par performing device.
At the end of the day for me beyond what one person uses their laptop for it comes down to this: RAM Is actually very cheap to manufacture and spec out compared to other components.
While letting companies get away shorting customers by installing small amounts of memory today they’re locking them in to an early upgrade/replacement in the near future.
We shouldn’t let profit companies get away with these kind of tactics as long as memory is not just not user upgradable - not even vendor upgradable after the fact.
As someone who started out on a machine with 3.5K free RAM, and a time (later that decade) when 2MB of RAM was ~$1000, you never really have too much. Swap is essentially disabled for me on my 16G machines (and up).
Because boring consumer laptops are of course known for their copious amounts of expandable RAM and not for having one socket fitted with the minimum amount possible.
2. While a couple of hundred megabytes is usually a small portion of the total RAM, it could be a critical share of the free RAM, and this is what matters.
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