Linux

Run not one, but two electron based apps? 😅

All jokes aside, most desktop apps and web browsers, nowadays, use ungodly amounts of RAM. The pessimist in me blames Chrome and electron, but in reality it just comes down to programmers being more accustom to having access to more memory than they need.

I say relax and enjoy the lack of slowdowns - having too much RAM is not a problem, but having too little is. Your only concern should ever be trying to avoid the latter, and with 32gb of RAM you should be good until the next big Discord update. (slight /s on that last point)

RAM is the kind of thing you're better off having too much than not enough. Worst case the OS ends up with a very healthy and large file cache, which frees up your storage and makes things a bit faster/lets it spend the CPU on other things. If anything, your machine is future proofed against the ever increasing RAM hungriness of web apps. But if you run out of it, you get apps killed, hangs or major slowdowns as it hits the swap.

The thing with RAM is that it's easy for 99% of your workload to fit comfortably, and then there's one thing you temporarily need a bit more and you're screwed. My machine usually uses 8-12/32GB of RAM but yet I still ended up needing to add swap to my machine. Just opening up the Lemmy source code and spinning up the Rust LSP can use a solid 8+GB alone. I've compiled some AUR packages that needed more than 16GB of RAM. I have 16 cores so compiling anything with -j32 can very quickly bring down a machine to its knees even if each compile thread is only using like 256-512MB each.

Another example: my netbook has 8GB. 99% of the time it's fine, because it's a web browsing machine, and I probably average on 4GB usage on a heavy day with lots of tabs open. But if I open up VSCode and use any LSP be it TypeScript or Rust, the machine immediately starts swapping aggressively. I had to log out of my graphical session to compile Lemmy, barely.

RAM is cheap enough these days it's nice to have more than you need to not ever have to worry about it.

Run your web browser from RAM for faster browsing.

https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon

2 Chrome tabs at the same time!

With the rate at which Electron applications catch on? Nothing, you'll end up using it all in a few years time.

Nothing. My laptop has 8GB and while this is somewhat the limit, it's enough to browse, do office stuff, a bit of development/programming and even a bit of CAD for my 3D printer, video editing, retro-gaming and all sorts of things. I'd prefer to have 16GB because Firefox likes to eat a lot of RAM, but the laptop is too old for me to upgrade anything at this point.

If you'd like to waste your resources, you could run 4 other operating systems simultaneously in VMs. Or try artificial intelligence chatbots and load one of the large language models. They can easily make use of 32GB of memory and more.

Virtualize fun things for projects

Self host some stuff.

Just wait. In 10 years 32 gig is on the low side to just run the OS. Hardware getest faster and bigger, but software scales with it.

The more resources are available, the more people will program computers to use them.

My first graphics card had 128mb memory. These days it goes in gigabyte and they use the memory and processing power to produce amazing things.

On the other hand, they also are not as critical on efficiëncy as used to be, because there are simply more resources available anyway. As a consequence, some programs use a silly amount of resources for basically doing nothing. Sometimes I really feel like my browser is eating RAM.....

"just browse the internet" doesn't indicate that you don't need a powerful computer in 2023. Modern browsers are really heavy - and rendering websites are much more complex now.

Unless you're really frugal about your PC budget, I think it's definitely "to-go" for 32G

Mount your .cache dirs into memory via tmpfs

Nothing. Don't make up problems for your hardware, lol.

I'm guessing you listened to someone who didn't know what they were talking about.

Here's a little script I've put in my $PATH, called memsum:

#!/usr/bin/bash
/usr/bin/ps -eo rss,command --sort -rss | egrep $1 | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; sum +=hr} END {print sum}'

Now you can go: memsum firefox or memsum whatever and see that, actually, apps use a ridiculous amount of memory these days.

I can get Firefox up to 8GB by using things like Office 365.

Use it for caching more stuff to make your system even faster, virtualization and most importantly, browsers

Build everything from source ;p

you can disable paging (swap) i guess apart from launching more things at the same time and letting apps know you have ram for them to cache shit (check app settings some apps do have a how much ram should we use slider like okular the kde pdf viewer) and virtualisation of multiple os's i can't think of much

Just open a few more Chrome tabs: a couple of Ali Express and Amazon pages and a few YouTube videos and couple Reddit posts, and you'll be wondering why you only got 32.

Run your own ai to help with coding

Compile chromium, firefox or rust

Run different virtual machines for different purposes. For example, you can have a VM that does all its networking over a VPN and downloads torrents in the background while you do other things. Or you can run other OSs in VMs.

Also, containerized software is everywhere now and it uses more resources. Extra memory helps.

It’s great for multitasking without slowing down any other programs you may be running at the same time.

Depending on what sort of programming you are doing, you might use more of the RAM than “normal”.

supposed to

What do you mean?

Virtual Machines?

Not really RAM but you can support science!

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-ways-to-donate-your-cpu-time-to-science/

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

Doesn't your browser take it all yet? Don't worry, web frameworks' developers are working on that.