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by u801e
3032 days ago
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There's an old joke about emacs standing for eight megabytes and continuously swapping. But I think it's more useful to think about the percentage use of RAM for a given application. If you're running on a machine with 32 MB of RAM, then using 20 MB for a single application is obscene. But if you're running 32 GB, it's insignificant. Even so, a single application shouldn't be using a significant percentage of system RAM on an average consumer grade laptop/desktop (4 to 16 GB of RAM). |
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I'm currently on a 16GB machine, where I only have a terminal, a text editor and a browser with few (<10) mild (wikipedia, hn, ...) tabs open. That gives 351 processes using a total of 8.7GB memory (2.11GB of which is unswappable, and about 1 gig of already compressed memory). My 3GB of disk caches go on top of that, and 0.5GB has already been swapped out.
I sure have room for a 20MB binary right now. However, on an 8GB system, I'd be in the red. I would already be swapping several GB, and any allocation would either evict (useful!) caches or swap out the memory of another process.
Any memory allocated in that state reduces the performance of some other component of the system.
Of course, 20MB is much better than the status-quo of casually burning a few hundred MB (or even a few GB) for simple tasks, and the situation of being out of memory with a whopping 8GB is caused primarily by the other "bad citizens", but the point here is that 20MB is indeed a quite big chunk of memory in real-world use-cases.