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by vicktorium 882 days ago
what apps can't run on 4GB?

games?

3D?

Editing?

have you tried forking chrome and increasing this limit?

3 comments

Video editors are a big one. I've heard of people crashing a browser tab with Figma as well.

For data exploration tools it's very easy to want to use 4GB+ of memory. I found the limit cumbersome while working on financial tools. It usually comes up in internal tools where you reliably have a fast internet connection; it's harder to reach the limit for public-facing tools because there the slowness of sending 4GB+ to the browser is the more limiting factor.

The annoying part isn't just that the limit is there, but that you can't really handle it gracefully as the developer -- when the browser decides you've hit the limit, it may just replace the page with an error message.

For a video editor, only a small portion of the video needs to be in memory at any given time. The rest can be squirreled away in an IndexedDB store, which has no hard size limits on most browsers.
It's one of our big barriers over at Figma. Creative tools in general hit this limit pretty quickly. For context, I was a very heavy user of Photoshop back in the day. Even a decade ago I remember hitting 20GB of active memory use for Photoshop.

Things get really big really quick, especially when you're storing uncompressed versions of raster elements in memory. To frame things in a different way, 4GB is 22 seconds of 1080p video if you're loading the raw frames into memory.

Some AI apps. You can't really load a capable LLM in 4 GB. Or does this limit not apply when dealing with WASM and WebGPU?