1801
might be a form of Jevons Paradox (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
290 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

https://raru.re/@ocean/116214437024389203

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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".

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent