Why is everything so memory-hungry these days?

Michael Uplawski · 12-07-2018, 11:45 PM

When I fly over the whole thread until this point, I suspect there are two kinds of people out there: Those who observe (memory usage) and those who do stuff (which might or might not use memory).

My own view on this matter:

The numbers do not express a quality, like in “bad” or “good”. Never! Their importance is where and when they allow comparisons and basic arithmetic. They are completely unimportant in any other context. And even the arithmetic does not lead to a situation, where the result is necessarily “bad” or “good”. This is as true for money and exchanges of money as it is for memory usage.
I said, it was my own view on the matter, I am not a politician, nor chief of “marketing research and public relations” or something.
“Oh My God !! Your software uses up 80% of the system ressources! Do something!”
My Boss: “DARN! We will see, how we can best make use of the remaining 20% in the next release! Promised!”

zeebra · 12-08-2018, 04:18 AM

This is an interesting thread.. I have no answer though.

trafikpolisen · 12-08-2018, 01:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Myk267

Are these the measurements of these programs in memory?

Yes, at least as reported by Gnome system monitor.

trafikpolisen · 12-08-2018, 02:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jsbjsb001

Are you really going to expect KDE/MATE/Cinnamon/etc to run smoothly on a old machine with little RAM?

Well, maybe not really, but "back in the day" you could take a machine that basically was ready for the scraps and would be hopeless with Windows XP, whack Ubuntu (or something similar) on to it and it would be a perfectly good, responsive machine.

sevendogsbsd · 12-08-2018, 02:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Myk267

Mostly agree, but: OOM and OOM-like situations are a disaster.

Then the answer is have an insane amount and you'll never run out

32GB and moving to 64GB on this box, 96GB on my build server

I call it future-proofing. I can build 800 FreeBSD ports (6 at a time) on this current machine and the max ram I use is around 13 GB. Overkill, yes. In my 20+ years of IT, the only OOM situation I have ever been in was running WoW on a Mac Pro with 24GB RAM. No clue why, maybe WoW bug.

ondoho · 12-09-2018, 05:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JWJones

It's a simple matter to use xbindkeys to do this.

glad you mentioned it.
you should factor in all those external utilities if you compare to a windowmanager that has them built in.

don't get me wrong, i think it's great to have this modular approach, and i have nothing about superminimal windowmanagers, but the comparison tables suck.

ondoho · 12-09-2018, 05:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sevendogsbsd

Buy more ram if you need more...not sure what else to say about that.

but in Linux you still have choices if that isn't an option.

Quote:

Originally Posted by trafikpolisen

Well, maybe not really, but "back in the day" you could take a machine that basically was ready for the scraps and would be hopeless with Windows XP, whack Ubuntu (or something similar) on to it and it would be a perfectly good, responsive machine.

there's your problem right there:
Ubuntu isn't that distro anymore.
nowadays, people typically "whack" antiX on an old machine, and it would be a perfectly good, responsive machine.

facit: Linux has improved since then, Ubuntu has just grown.

Marinad123 · 01-09-2019, 02:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by trafikpolisen

Why is it that a just booted fresh install of for example Linux Mint or Xubuntu uses 600-700 MB+ of memory, when not THAT long ago Ubuntu or Xubuntu used only a bit above 100 MB with no programs launched? Even distros today marketed as lightweight seems to use wasteful amounts of memory for (me at least) no obvious reasons.
This got me thinking, so I installed old Xubuntu 9.10 on a VM, followed by the latest LTS version of the same system, 18.04.

Here's a few random comparisons:
Network Manager was 592 KB, now 16,3 MB
Thunar was 1,3 MB, now 12,6 MB
xfdesktop was 6,1 MB, now 34,9 MB
xfce4-session was 1,2 MB, now 13,5 MB

The systems back then felt just as usable and visually appealing as they do today (at least to me), but with a fraction of the memory consumption. Yes, memory may come in abundance these days, but why use for example 28 MB (galculator) when the job could probably be done with a MB or two?

One of the reasons I switched from Windows to Linux was how fast, efficient and lightweight Linux was compared to Windows back then. Might still be faster and more efficient, but when it comes to memory usage, the difference seems smaller these days.

And don't get me started on smartphones. Why does for example Spotify, an ONLINE music service, hog up almost 7 GB? Just seems stupid.. Yes, I know this is storage and not RAM, but it's still interesting..

When the car manufacturers design a car, they want it as efficient as possible to consume as little petrol as possible. When chip companies designs CPU's, they probably wan't them to use as little power as possible in relation to performance. Why couldn't the same philosophy apply to software?

Can someone explain this?

really interesting