Much like a cat can stretch out and somehow occupy an entire queen-sized bed, Linux will happily cache your file system as long as there is available memory.
Note for the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" people, in the description of earlyoom:
Why is "available" memory checked as opposed to "free" memory? On a healthy Linux system, "free" memory is supposed to be close to zero, because Linux uses all available physical memory to cache disk access. These caches can be dropped any time the memory is needed for something else.
You've clearly never lived with a cat. Your metaphor is crushed by the Kitty Expansion Theory: No piece of furniture is large enough for a cat and any other additional being.
Exactly. That kitty encompasses and rules over aaaalllll that couch. Surfaces and interior volume (as soon as he discovers it). No room for anybody else. Just ask him.
The kitty expansion theory is incomplete, any piece of furniture is large enough for both a cat and an additional being provided the additional being was there first
I actually do this with NixOS impermanence lol. The things I need are symlinked from a different partition and the stuff I don't need automatically gets wiped clean.
The cat is the Rimworld mod with a hefty memory leak yesterday. 32 GB was full in seconds. But it gave me enough time to find the culprit and kill Rimworld without trashing my session every time.
Current 4 year old laptop with 128GB of ECC RAM is wonderful and is used all the time with simulations, LLMs, ML modelling, and the real heavy lifter, Google Chrome.
Most modern laptops can do 64 gb of ddr4. It's expensive but doable. Like most U series CPUs are limited at 64 gb. Something with a xeon mobile chip will probably see a lot more.
yeah, i was just pointing out that we've seen desktop chips in laptops before, it's not common, but it has happened, and will likely continue to happen.
Dell 7740 Workstation laptop. Has a Xeon processor and a 16GB Quadro video card as well. 5 M2 slots so I currently have 36TB of SSD as well. 4k screen, physical privacy shutter camera, actual buttons for the trackpad. I love this thing.
The other day I got a Mini PC to use as a home server (including as media server with Kodi).
It has 8GB of RAM, came with some Windows (10 or 11), didn't even try it and wiped it out, put Lubunto on it and a bunch of services along with Kodi.
Even though it's running X in order to have Kodi there and Firefox is open and everything, it's using slightly over 2GB of RAM.
I keep wanting to upgrade it to 16 GB, because, you know, I just like mucking about with hardware and there's the whole new toy feeling, but I look at the memory usage and just can't bring myself around to do it just for fun, as it would be a completelly useless upgrade and not even bright eyed uuh, shinny me can convince adult me to waste 60 bucks on something so utterly completelly useless.
I wish. I use vscode which sucks up most of my resources (basically a terribly inefficient IDE running on elotron...). 32gb and it still not enough to run my dev environment decently.
The reason vscode is so popular is because it is far more efficient than the electron app it's based on. Atom was slow and the worst resource hog I've ever seen.
The plugin ecosystem and great built-in support for the most popular languages keep it popular.
VS Code wasn't based on Atom. It was written from scratch. The system architecture is very different.
VS Code uses Electron, but all the heavy stuff is running in separate threads or processes, which is why it feels faster than some other Electron apps.
Unfortunately, many Electron apps break the #1 rule of desktop app development: Never do any heavy processing on the UI thread. Any Electron app that does heavy-ish processing really needs to use node:worker_threads or something similar, plus a UI library like React that can prioritise handling of user actions over rendering other parts of the UI.
Hate to type this but mate, skill issue. If its taking that much memory check your addons because you fucked up somewhere. I use it with several debugging and linting addons and it runs on a virtual remote desktop where I'm lucky if I have 4GB to share between vscode and the browser with 20 tabs open.
Maybe your issue is thst you ran heavy programs through the vscode console and those registered in the task manager as vscode? Idk, but either way, skill issue :P
Do not underestimate the ram needed just by the lsp. I switch from vscode to nvim, and for some project 8gb is not enough due to that : that part of the memory consumption is sadly not editor-dependant :/
I use neovim (btw) and have it kitted out like a full IDE and it uses about 1gb of RAM at most to run a project. Crazy how much RAM static analysis takes.
