In university, they stopped giving out software licenses for personal machines in favor of letting students connect to virtual machines they hosted. They allocated 8GB of RAM which wasn't horrible at the time, but they only allocated 4GB of storage. Only time I've ever seen that ratio.
Probably because the RAM was pooled, but storage was not. So your RAM allocation is part of a larger pool that is shared between all currently logged in users. But your storage is allocated/reserved up front, and is used only by you.
That makes sense. They also pushed us to store everything on the cloud.
So could the total amount of RAM be smaller than the total amount all the machines cumulatively think is available? How does the pool prevent all the machines from crashing if all of them fill up their memory?
Kind of. Think of the RAM allowance as a "maximum" limit, not a reserved allocation. The VM host might have 64 GB RAM, and perhaps allows 20 VMS running in it at once. Each VM can allocate up to a max of 8GB from that host. Not everyone is running their VM at the same time, even if they are, not everyone would be running at their limit of 8GB of memory. If it does happen that 20 users are trying to use 8GB at the same time on one host, then it's the same as anytime an OS runs low on RAM, it would start paging out to disk, everything would slow down for everyone. If that happens too many times, they could shuffle some users' VMs around to balance the loads across hosts.
Can someone explain to me why it always seems like everyone on lemmy are in one of these two categories:
1: "I remember my first computer used ferro-magnetic beads that we glued to lengths of string. We could store nearly 10 bytes in one string".
2: "My first computer was an old iPad that only had 64GB storage, couldn't even store my photo album."
It's like everyone is aged either 89 or 19, nobody in between.
My first computer was two sticks we had to bang together but now modern technology has ruined what was a good thing.
I typed my response before I saw this but yeah, it's my first response every time.
Lol. Mine was a tape drive, then 360kb diskette. But even today I have a OpenMediaVault server with 256MB of memory and its fine for audio and 720p streaming. The key is software optimization...which Windows seems bad at.
Because there are no humans and AI can only think so much.
I remember my first 20MB HDD. Imagined it would be impossible to ever fill this gargantuan hog. Well...
I'm young enough that the first "computer" I ever owned in my childhood was the first generation iPad. 64 GB felt huge back then and was a pretty big deal for solid state storage for the time.
I then got a junker Windows XP computer mainly because the iPad didn't let me mess around with the OS nearly as much as I wanted. Learned to program on that old computer using the iPad for online tutorials. But the hard drive was only 40 GB and it blew kid me's mind the difference in size between the single chip of the iPad and the metal brick of the hard drive, yet the hard drive has less storage.
Lol...that is still a thing that amazes me up to today. My watch now has more ram than my first 10 computers had combined with ram and HDD 😁
It is pretty insane how dense storage can get. Some companies have showcased 4tb micro SD cards and you can buy a 2tb one right now.
Since when was 8GB RAM, let alone 8GB VRAM, a problem? Are you running ML models, video editing or some special games?? Or some weird poorly-written thing like Windows OS?
Nowadays even at 1080p 8GB of Vram doesn't cut it.
Doesn't cut what? Web browsing? Watching videos? Playing new games?
Playing new games at high settings. The card often does have raw performance to handle it but due to lack of VRAM results in terrible framerate or lack of detail
Ah, that makes sense. I rarely-if-ever play heavyweight games.
Run new games at 144fps at maxed settings in native 4k, which as we all know is completely necessary and extremely distinguishable from 60fps at medium settings with upscaling.
My 1060 would like a word, at 940*544 so it'll be blurry. But it would like to talk.
Software is a gas, it expands to use all available resources.
I have 32GB of RAM, and run out occasionally. At the moment I have two CAD programs, thousands of pages of datasheets and reference manuals, an IDE, and ~50 browser tabs open. I don't HAVE to have them all open at once, but it does save me a lot of time.
My next machine will have 128GB, and I expect that will run out of memory too.
Also, sometimes you need to use software that has a memory leak, so a bit of extra RAM gives you some more time before it crashes.
Photogrammetry can also get resource hungry.
Modern AAA games above 1440p and high settings usually can use that much VRAM.
8gb of ram is also not enough for anything particularly heavy.
Are you running ML models
Yes.
Satisfactory took 10gb for whatever reason. Playing 1440p at 90fps
Linux Mint runs pretty well on 8 gigs of ram on a T460.
Fedora and Arch both work pretty well on 4gb. Plasma and Gnome were surprisingly decent, and xfce was great but a little uglier. Blender, FreeCad, Minecraft (with performance mods), Celeste, for example all worked perfectly fine, with maybe a few browser tabs in the background as well. You couldn't do anything too heavy, but it was pretty usable (I was using it as a travel laptop mostly). I'd say 2gb is where it becomes too little to live with.
The software industry show you quickly that 8GB, independent where, isn't by far enough. Since HW programmed obsolence is out, since current PC last more than a Washing machine, they do it with min sys specs of their products. The times, where a 3D FPS was released in a single 96KB file is far away.
Still downloadable as Abandonware https://www.myabandonware.com/game/kkrieger-chapter-1-cl1
The demo scene is still around, although it's maybe less popular. That was a demo scene thing, not a commercial game.
Also, iirc, it was very heavy on performance for the time because the procedural textures were so expensive.
I know, but I played iit on it's release in 2005 on the old PC these years without problems. Even if it is an 10 minutes game, its a marvel to put it with good graphics, sound and music in only 96 KB, even some avatars here have more. It still works in current Windows.
I got a HDD very recently for a backup drive for my server and I'm very happy with that decision. 8 tb, lightly used but an enterprise drive, for $100.
Who needs more than 8GB disk space for a Debian computer with Firefox and Chrome?
I fondly remember having 8 GB of storage, because I could back up my hard drive on like two dollars worth of CD-Rs.
I feared no virus. Reinstalling XP was a monthly affair regardless.
I have 3GB of VRAM. 8 would be great!
My first computer, an Atari 520ST, came standard with 196K of ROM and 512K of RAM. The OS (GEM) was on a dedicated chip. Everything was run off floppy disks.
I remember the OS running from an 5^1/4^" cardboard Floppy
ebooks
