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by manigandham 2295 days ago
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it.

Also I find most performance issues with big apps are a result of browser extensions that interfere. Try using a private window without any extensions.

4 comments

>Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Says the OS developer, says the browser developer, says the webapp developer, says the developer of whatever else you have running. Developer time is expensive. Says one. Look it runs fine and is snappy. Says another on his maxed out development pc forgetting about his grandma. Why should i care about that extra memory load when most pc's nowadays have x amount. Says yet another.

And so the slugfest continues.

>Also I find most performance issues with big apps are a result of browser extensions that interfere. Try using a private window without any extensions.

Browser extensions can definitely make a browser sluggish but most don't interfere with the content. The only ones that do AND are common are adblockers which have a tendency of making it less sluggish.

Vacuuming up RAM while all the other applications have to fight over the leftover scraps or wait for paging to get the data from disk (1) is NOT a good thing as much as Electron-zealots want to normalize running a multi-GB browser instance for every single application.

(1): burning through an SSD's limited number of write cycles OR being at least an order of magnitude slower to access in the case of HDDs

Who says it was otherwise unused? Web apps aren't used in isolation, the additional RAM you're using to speed things up by 3% has caused my code look-ups to slow down by 30% because you've consumed what was my file cache.
> Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Bloat RAM is also wasted RAM. If it's not being used as a cache of reasonable size, or in a time/speed tradeoff, all you're doing is making things worse.

> If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it.

That's a statement that only really applies to people misunderstanding RAM used by the page cache or suspended programs. And both of those depend on active applications not allocating that memory!