Buddahriffic comments on might be a form of Jevons Paradox

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago (8 children)

Ib4 "uNusEd RAm iS wAStEd RaM!"

No, unused RAM keeps my PC running fast. I remember the days where accidentally hitting the windows key while in a game meant waiting a minute for it to swap the desktop pages in, only to have to swap the game pages back when you immediately click back into it, expecting it to either crash your computer or probably disconnect from whatever server you were connected to. Fuck that shit.

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[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 points 6 months ago (7 children)

I mean unused RAM is still wasted: You'd want all the things cached in RAM already so they're ready to go.

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[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I don't want my PC wasting resources trying to guess every possible next action I might take. Even I don't know for sure what games I'll play tonight.

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[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Well you'd want your OS to cache the start menu in the scenario you highlighted above. The game could also run better if it can cache assets not currently in use instead of waiting for the last moment to load them. Etc.

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[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

Yeah, for things that will likely be used, caching is good. I just have a problem with the "memory is free, so find more stuff to cache to fill it" or "we have gigabytes of RAM so it doesn't matter how memory-efficient any program I write is".

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[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 months ago

“memory is free, so find more stuff to cache to fill it”

As long as it's being used responsibly and freed when necessary, I don't have a problem with this

“we have gigabytes of RAM so it doesn’t matter how memory-efficient any program I write is”

On anything running on the end user's hardware, this I DO have a problem with.

I have no problem with a simple backend REST API being built on Spring Boot and requiring a damn gigabyte just to provide a /status endpoint or whatever. Because it runs on one or a few machines, controlled by the company developing it usually.

When a simple desktop application uses over a gigabyte because of shitty UI frameworks being used, I start having a problem with it, because that's a gigabyte used per every single end user, and end users are more numerous than servers AND they expect their devices to do multiple things, rather than running just one application.

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[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

I mean I have access to a computer with a terabyte of RAM I'm gonna go ahead and say that most applications aren't going to need that much and if they use that much I'm gonna be cross.

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[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

Wellll

If you have a terabyte of RAM sitting around doing literally nothing, it's kinda being wasted. If you're actually using it for whatever application can make good use of it, which I'm assuming is some heavy-duty scientific computation or running full size AI models or something, then it's no longer being wasted.

And yes if your calculator uses the entire terabyte, that's also memory being wasted obviously.

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[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 point 6 months ago

That's a different definition of wasted though. The RAM isn't lost just because it isn't being currently utilised. It's sitting there waiting for me to open a intensive task.

What I am objecting to is programs using more RAM than they need simply because it's currently available. Aka chromium.

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