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by bslaq 283 days ago
300 MB is 1.25% of my RAM. An application using 1.25% of my RAM seems reasonable.
5 comments

It's more than all the RAM I had in my Windows 98 computer that ran Windows and Winamp, which was fully capable of playing music and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun at the same time.
Idealistically it should not be using so much memory and burning up the world’s silicon. Efficient computing is a backbone of why we trust computers. (I am horrified with the windows explorer in windows 11 nowadays for its slowness.)
How are you burning up silicon by using your memory? If anything you're wasting more silicon by making low-density RAM modules.
Less efficient software means more frequent hardware upgrades.
It's 300MB of RAM when it's not doing much, it's the lowest possible value.

When so many little tools that you normally keep running in the background, it starts adding up. Not to mention that not everyone has that much RAM. Until recently, Apple still shipped Macbooks with 8GB RAM.

I've also started having issues with my Windows partition filling up with these applications. Again, no one application is a problem, it's the trend that's the problem.

No single raindrop is responsible for the flood.

How about 10 electron applications all with different purposes using 12.5% of your RAM?
Sounds totally reasonable to me. I'm running ten windowed applications and they're still leaving 87.5% of my RAM available for other things? No problem there.
No they’re all trivial things that could all be using 1% of your ram. And when you try to do demanding work on your machine you often have to close half of them to avoid stutter.
I'm not running 10 Electron apps that are trivial. They tend to be actual functional applications.

And we're talking about memory usage here. Nothing is stuttering from not enough memory if they're only using 12.5%.

12.5% is just the ram. We’re not even talking about excessive cpu cycles for browser animations yet. That’ll get you stuttering.
Right, the subject is the RAM. Not CPU.

But who has 10 applications all showing animations at the same time? Or constantly animating at all? If a button animates when you click it, or a message animates when it pops up, it's not exactly slowing down my system.

Modern OS's handle it just fine.
1.25% of Elon Musk's net worth is $5.2 billion dollars, but buying, I don't know, a new PC for that price would not be reasonable.

Okay, bad analogy. My point is: just because your budget is high and you've got bytes to burn doesn't mean all those bytes should be burned.

Paying for RAM and having it sit around doing nothing is stupid.
This is true for autoscaling VMs which run one application and when underutilized the load is reconsolidated.

It is NOT true for desktops which run different applications all the time, the user often switches between them, and where uncommitted memory is automatically used by the kernel as disk cache space.

Paying for RAM because a dozen different programs can't be bothered to make user focused software is stupid.
It's not doing nothing. It's caching frequently accessed files on my filesystem, which generally speeds everything up especially with HDDs. Why should someone instead waste that on a needlessly bloated music player?
…HDDs?
Hard disk drive
I don’t think it’s possible to find computers selling today with one of those.
That choice is for me, the user, to make. App developers don't get to make it for me. If apps are smaller, then I can use that memory to run more apps, cache things, etc.
So choose not to use the app, dear god this conversation is awful.
I do. The instant I saw it uses Electron, I decided the app wasn't for me and closed the tab. But why would that mean I shouldn't participate in a discussion (which I didn't even start myself) on whether the excessive RAM usage is ok?
So choose not to partake the discussion, dear god this conversation is awful.
This is why inflation is rampant.