you don't need more 4GB of RAM
you don't need more 4GB of RAM
225 comments
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You've clearly never lived with a cat. Your metaphor is crushed by the Kitty Expansion Theory: No piece of furniture is large enough for a cat and any other additional being.
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Caching be like
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Caching do indeed be like.
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The kitty expansion theory is incomplete, any piece of furniture is large enough for both a cat and an additional being provided the additional being was there first
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My cat would just extend perpendicular to the length of my bed so i have enough space to decide to sit on one of the two remaining sides of the bed.
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Exactly. That kitty encompasses and rules over aaaalllll that couch. Surfaces and interior volume (as soon as he discovers it). No room for anybody else. Just ask him.
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The other 28GB is for running chrome
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Three whole tabs!!
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One of the reasons I use Firefox.
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In my experience of switching from Chrome to Firefox in the last year thanks to Lemmy, I have to say that using FF for work comes with all sorts of performance issues.
Then again, my specific use case includes having ~10 windows open at ~20 tabs each, sometimes even more. Definitely pushing the limits of the browser lol
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Just like the human eye can only register 60fps and no more, your computer can only register 4gb of RAM and no more. Anything more than that is just marketing.
Fucking /S since you clowns can't tell.
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Jokes on you, because i looked into this once. I don't know the exact ms the light-sensitive rods in human eyes need to refresh the chemical anymore but it resulted in about 70 fps, so about 13 ms i guess (the color-sensitive cones are far slower). But psycho-optical effects can drive that number up to 100 fps in LCD displays. Though it looks like you can train yourself with certain computer tasks to follow movements with your eye, being far more sensible to flickering.
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According to this study, the eye can see a difference as high as 500 fps. While this is a specific scenario, it’s a scenario that could possibly happen in a video game, so I guess it means we can go to around 500 hz monitors before it becomes too much or unnessessary.
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It's not about training, eye tracking is just that much more sensitive to pixels jumping
You can immediately see choppy movement when you look around in a 1st person view game. Or if it's an RTS you can see the trail behind your mouse anyway
I can see this choppiness at 280 FPS. The only way to get rid of it is to turn on strobing, but that comes with double images at certain parts of the screen
Just give me a 480 FPS OLED with black frame insertion already, FFS
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This is only true if you're still using a 32 bit cpu, which almost nobody is. 64 bit cpus can use up to 16 million TB of RAM.
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Sorry I forgot to put my giant /s.
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With PAE, a 32 bit CPU can also use more, but each process is still limited to 4GiB
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This is only true if you’re still using a 32 bit cpu
Bank switching to "fake" the ability to access more address space was a big thing in the 80s...so it's technically possible to access addresses that are wider than the address bus by dividing it up into portions that it can see.
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That’s not sarcasm, it’s misinformation. Not surprising that people downvoted you even though it was just a joke.
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That's what makes it a joke. Does anyone here unironcally think the human eye can only see 60 fps or that more than 4 gigs of ram is just marketing?
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Op doesn't run applications, just an os...
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I run applications, and it still rarely exceeds 6 gigs. Damn, my ram is mostly disk cache at this point
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My 2010 arm board with 256MB ram running openmediavault and minidlna for music streaming. Still lots of RAM left.
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Just wait till all the browser tabs sit down, and need to swap to the floor.
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I genuinely can't imagine having more than 7 tabs open. I can barely keep track of that many. How do you do it, wisened mistrel of the woods?
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For me it's a pattern of "Ctrl+t" to open a new tab and then I search "my interesting query". After that, I use "shift+tab" or "Ctrl+shift+tab" to navigate between tabs. Rinse and repeat until I get tired.
I don't like searching in my current tab because I don't want to lose the info I have.
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You made me realize I use tabs as bookmarks... Darn. 20gb bookmark file here we go.
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Oh, here's the 4 pages of documentation of items and crafting recipes of this nodded game I'm playing that are open at all times.
Then there's the tsb with the video series I'm watching, the tab with the dropout home, other two tabs for two series I'd like to watch, about 3 different tabs that I just closed down that were opened yesterday to search some ffxiv market item prices for a friend, WhatsApp web, some Path of exile trade live tabs in case an item I've been searching for a month shows up on trade in a reasonable price to pick up the game again, the medianxl ladder to check for gear on too players, 2-3 tabs for players on the ladder to check their gears as a rough template,...
I'd say at any given time it's a minimum of 10, and I'm not being held responsible of my work browser tabs. That's more like, 4 github repos because they ask me about stuff and I forget to close them, hue, the spark docs on like 5 tabs, 3 google searches, several excels with project tracking stuff, and maybe an extra 10 to 20 tabs open depending of what I'm searching or have been asked about in the last 2 days.
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For myself, it's ADHD and keeping things open that I intend to get back to but rarely do.
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See what you did there 😆! I always feel like my computer is thrashing every time it starts using Swap.
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Current 4 year old laptop with 128GB of ECC RAM is wonderful and is used all the time with simulations, LLMs, ML modelling, and the real heavy lifter, Google Chrome.
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What 4 year old laptop can handle that much RAM?
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About 10 years ago I was like "FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn't enough to avoid swapping hell, I'll get 1 GB of extra memory." ...and that was that!
These days I'm like "4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that's fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who's going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? ...oh I've done it a lot of times and it's... fine."
The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.
And that's basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can't do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn't work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.
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It really depends on the quality of software you are running? A SMTP, IMAP, Mumble, Photoprism, Jellyfin, bittorrent, Tor, Subsonic compatible server, who even remembers what else? Fine. One small Minecraft world? Boom you're dead.
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I remember building my gaming machine in 2008 and put 4GB (2x2) in, then RAM prices tanked 6 months later so I added another 4GB. I remember having lots of conversations where I was like "yeah, 8GB is over kill" but what I didn't expect is that it was such overkill that when I built my next machine in 2012, I still only put 8GB on it.
It wasn't until 2019 that I built a machine and put 16GB in it. I ran on 8GB for over a decade. Pretty impressive for gaming.
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Am I the only one around here that maxes out their RAM to the max that the board will take? Sure 128 Gig is overkill now, but the 32 Gig I installed in my last laptop was supposed to be overkill just 3 years ago. I did manage to use my previous laptop for a whole 12 years with only 16 Gig.
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Definitely not, I do the same.
I installed 64 GB of RAM in my Windows laptop 4 years ago and had been using 64 GB of RAM in the laptop that it replaced - which was from 2013 (I think I bought it in 2014-2105). I was using 32 GB of RAM prior (on Linux and Windows laptops), all the way back to 2007 or so.
My work MacBook Pros generally have 32-64 GB of RAM, but my personal MacBook Air (the 15” M2) has 16 GB, simply because the upgrade wasn’t a cost effective one (and the M1 before it had performed great with 16) and because I’d only planned on using it for casual development. But since I’ve been using it as my main personal development machine and for self-hosted AI, and have run into its limits, when I replace it I’ll likely opt for 64 GB or more.
My Windows gaming desktop only has 32 GB of RAM, though - that’s because getting the timings higher with more RAM - particularly 4 sticks - was prohibitively expensive when I built it, and then when the cost wasn’t a concern and I tried to upgrade, I learned that my third and fourth RAM slots weren’t functional. I could upgrade to 64 GB in two slots but it wouldn’t really be worth it, since I only use it for gaming.
My Linux desktop / server has 128 GB of ECC RAM, though, because that’s as much as the motherboard supported.
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I have no problems currently on my personal computer with 16GB. If RAM is ever an issue, you can always upgrade (especially if you leave slots empty). Plus RAM generally has a tendency to get cheaper over time, so why waste money now?
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I ran my old machine also from 2010 till this year on 8gb. Also for gaming the 2010 i7 was quite fine. The only bottleneck was the VRAM where we somehow went from 1GB being perfectly suitable to 4GB being barely enough. Meanwhile old games sometimes look better than modern games, because they actually put effort into optimizing the graphics.
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In 2008
a lot ofmost software was still 32 bit, you couldn't use more than 4GiB per process. In that sense anything more than that was overkill unless you used a lot of programs at the same time and your OS supported physical address extension (PAE).-
All windows and Linux versions I've run since 2008 supported 64 bit. The games I was running might not have, but I can't really be held responsible for what they want to write. Also, multitasking has always been a thing, and chrome came out in 2008 as well, so the single task 4GB limitations hasn't really been an issue for a while as far as gaming/regular desktop usage goes(unless, again, the applications you're running aren't written to support 64bit/more than 4GB, which you can't really be held responsible for.)
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I have 32GB and regularly fill both that and my swap space to the point where my system freezes up and i have to restart.
i am quite tabby though. And vscode has become quite a memory hog and i usually have several of those open too as i work across different projects
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You use Chrome for everything including writing code and notes. Different outcome was unexpected really.
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well, i use firefox for my browsing but yes i get your point
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I have this misunderstanding even if I use Linux a lot that when I work for a long time with a lot of things opened… my RAM fill up and never get down.
I heard it had to do with swap, can you quickly explain why?
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You might benefit from installing earlyoom. It'll kill some of your processes before the system freezes from running out of memory.
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Appreciate this. I have a Chromebook running Garuda with only 4gb of RAM, and if I get too much going the system locks up. This might help it handle things better.
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thanks, i'll take a look.
I was getting to the point of writing something for it
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The other day I got a Mini PC to use as a home server (including as media server with Kodi).
It has 8GB of RAM, came with some Windows (10 or 11), didn't even try it and wiped it out, put Lubunto on it and a bunch of services along with Kodi.
Even though it's running X in order to have Kodi there and Firefox is open and everything, it's using slightly over 2GB of RAM.
I keep wanting to upgrade it to 16 GB, because, you know, I just like mucking about with hardware and there's the whole new toy feeling, but I look at the memory usage and just can't bring myself around to do it just for fun, as it would be a completelly useless upgrade and not even bright eyed uuh, shinny me can convince adult me to waste 60 bucks on something so utterly completelly useless.
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I wish. I use vscode which sucks up most of my resources (basically a terribly inefficient IDE running on elotron...). 32gb and it still not enough to run my dev environment decently.
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I use neovim (btw) and have it kitted out like a full IDE and it uses about 1gb of RAM at most to run a project. Crazy how much RAM static analysis takes.
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Hate to type this but mate, skill issue. If its taking that much memory check your addons because you fucked up somewhere. I use it with several debugging and linting addons and it runs on a virtual remote desktop where I'm lucky if I have 4GB to share between vscode and the browser with 20 tabs open.
Maybe your issue is thst you ran heavy programs through the vscode console and those registered in the task manager as vscode? Idk, but either way, skill issue :P
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Do not underestimate the ram needed just by the lsp. I switch from vscode to nvim, and for some project 8gb is not enough due to that : that part of the memory consumption is sadly not editor-dependant :/
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(basically a terribly inefficient IDE
Hard disagree
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Hmm. But have you tried it with second and third linuxes? What about eightses?
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He doesn't even know about second Linux...
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Someone clearly doesn’t play Cities: Skylines with mods
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Yar
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Much like a cat can stretch out and somehow occupy an entire queen-sized bed, Linux will happily cache your file system as long as there is available memory.
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Note for the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" people, in the description of earlyoom:
Why is "available" memory checked as opposed to "free" memory? On a healthy Linux system, "free" memory is supposed to be close to zero, because Linux uses all available physical memory to cache disk access. These caches can be dropped any time the memory is needed for something else.
So yeah, there's a difference.
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If that picture was of a Windows installation, Windows would be a Sumo Wrestler instead of a kitten.
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Sumo on a kitty bed
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I use both Fedora (daily driver) and Windows 11 Pro (gaming), and Windows doesn't use much more RAM honestly. Fedora uses currently 10.5 GB of RAM with Firefox, Spotify, Plex, and Telegram running (looks like a couple of YouTube tabs in Firefox are having a party here with 1 GB of used RAM for three tabs...), and Windows is typically only 1-2 GB above this with the same type of usage. I have never maxed out my 32 GB of RAM on either OSs.
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You have a lot of ram, linux will try to use most of it, it's a normal thing. There's a huge difference from using a large amount of ram when available to NEEDING that amount to run.Try installing both OSes on a machine with 4gb, and see the difference between them. One will be usable, while the other will have a poor performance. You can even push it harder with a 1gb machine. Linux will provide a system with basic functionality, while windows will be unusable.
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I have the same setup - Fedora daily driver and Windows 11 Pro. I recently switched from Windows daily driver and it's crazy how much better my laptop runs with Fedora. Processor temp and RAM usage are both less than half of what they were on Windows.
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4GB? I think you should clean up a little, do a like debloating
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mount $HOME in tmpfs
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I actually do this with NixOS impermanence lol. The things I need are symlinked from a different partition and the stuff I don't need automatically gets wiped clean.
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I actually have my
~/.cachemounted as a tmpfs. No need to write that to disk when I have like 50GB of free RAM most of the time.-
I have considered it a few times ngl
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Running and LSP on a monorepo will destroy those 4gigs no problem.
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Monorepos are cancer. Too bad I have no choice about it at work.
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I actually run 32GB on my desktop with Mint. I run 12GB on my laptop with Mint. Both of these have Celeron CPUs.
I love it.
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Me using jvm based software for work and it barely being enough...
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The cat is the Rimworld mod with a hefty memory leak yesterday. 32 GB was full in seconds. But it gave me enough time to find the culprit and kill Rimworld without trashing my session every time.
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When I start editing in Davinci Resolve....well, that's why I went from 32 to 64 a few years ago.
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I installed 64gb of ram on my gaming laptop and Chrome took all of it.
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I genuinely don't know how people are having their web browser use so much ram. How many tabs do you have open? Even at work where I run a commercial loan origination system and our core customer system in a web browser, at most I'll have 15-20 tabs open. I don't know how people are having dozens and dozens of tabs open that they're using 64 gb of RAM.
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In my case, along with using my laptop as a regular PC, I also use this as my work computer. I contract for multiple companies and each window has tabs for each web software for every company, organized by consolidated tabs. So Google analytics, Crazyegg, tableau, and docs, calendar, etc. I also do web testing and each tab has tests.
I find that Edge does a better job at memory management so it's now my primary and I test on Chrome.
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One user had 7500 tabs open at once.
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Now snap some pics of this kitty laying in different places all over this couch; you now have a new meme: Address Space Layout Randomization.
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"Free" memory is actually usually used for cache. So instead of waiting to get data from the disk, the system can just read it directly from RAM after the first access. The more RAM you have, the more free space you'll have to use for cache. My machine often has over 20GB of RAM used as cache. You can see this with
free -m. IIRC both Gnome and KDE's system managers also show that now.
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I just took a Core i5, 6 GB RAM laptop from 2011 and reinstalled Linux Mint and put in a 1 TB SSD. The difference between that and Ubuntu 23.10 and a 750 GB 5400 RPM drive was like night and day.
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It was the SSD, just sayin.
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Kid named programs above OS-level:
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Android studio: *big fat cat in the middle of the sofa"
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Work gave me a 16gb laptop for Android development.
It took up to 20 minutes to incrementally compile.
They eventually bumped me up to 32gb when I complained enough that my swap file was 20gb.
Suddenly incremental compiles are <2 min
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That’s nice… if you only plan to run a bare operating system. Try processing some big-ass data files with R.
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You haven't tried compiling unreal engine or clicking too often on subsurface subdivision in Blender. But yeah you don't need it for playing games.
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This just means you're future proofed
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Just using local llama takes 32GB ram
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depends on quantization
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In a similar fashion I got my sons old netbook. It has 32GB flash as storage medium. 27GB were in use by Windows, Office, and Firefox. User file size was neglectable. Then it ran into problems because it wanted to download an 8GB update.
Now it runs Kubuntu, which uses about 4GB with LibreOffice and a load of other things.
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I feel like recently developed games and apps expect the user to have a "moden" sized RAM, meaning that the decs don't give a crap about optimizing RAM-usage.
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Transcoding an HDR blueray to h265 filled it up pretty quick and I'm about to start dabbling with game development/3d modeling.
I've also filled it up pretty quick learning how fast various data structures are in which situations. You don't really see a difference in speed until you get into the billions of items at least for python.
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Python is already really slow.
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For automations and small apps it's fast enough. It's a fair traidoff for the fast turnaround time.
I'm thinking of learning go or c though because i don't care much for the runtime errors. It's no fun using an application for a while just for a typo in a rarely used function to tank the entire app.
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Me on my 32GB ThinkPad that spends 99% of its time running only a browser and email client
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my install regularly balloons to 24gb...... it's probably zoom's fault, but still
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When in doubt, blame zoom. The sheer amount of completely different outlandish weird bugs and glitches as well as the fact that they were told what the correct API for screen sharing on Linux is just for them to completely ignore that and do something weird, specific, niche and bad instead … I've never seen something like that since like Windows xp.
I'm completely convinced they have absolutely no idea what they're doing on the frontend (app and web) and just have the latest newbie hire hack things together until it kinda works on their machine.
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We apps are the future for proprietary crap
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It's great that the system is so efficient. But things do come up. I once worked with an LSP server that was so hungry that I had to upgrade from 32 to 64gb to stop the OOM crashes. (Tbf I only ran out of memory when running the LSP server and compiler at the same time - but hey, I have work to do!) But now since I'm working in a different area I'm just way over-RAMed.
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If your Linux is not using 99% of RAM, then it's misconfigured.
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Got it. Removing RAM modules now.
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Thanks for giving a genuine smile :)
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More is more.
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Reminds me of a comment I made a few days ago that some people thought was a joke but nope, I was being serious.
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I sent you a little love via a reply. And an updoot.
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me a hard KVM user need a lot of RAM
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That that to the 3000 browser tabs I have open, two instances of VS code, the multithreaded python app I’m running and developing, the several-gigabytes large dataset that’s active in memory.
Some days, even 64 GB isn’t enough.
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Big dawg here running a supercomputer with 4 gigs of RAM. /s
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Always see my system chilling at 5 or 6 gb
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I ran with 8gb ram for 7 years because zram would shove my swap into what little ram I had available and it actually worked well enough that I didn't feel like upgrading until this year lol.
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4GB of RAM: load a model into llama.cpp
Explodes
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Apple be like: our 4gb is like 16gb from others
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That's right. Prize wise
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I was working on an app that needed to run on windows. Between chrome and virtual box, i absolutely had to upgrade to more than 16G
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Virtual box is not a type I hypervisor. If you are looking for better performance you could try KVM
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I actually downgraded my Laptop from 16 to 8 gig DDR3L and did not spot a difference
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I put in 64GB because I'm a piece of shit and those empty memory slots looked bad
225 comments