I have this misunderstanding even if I use Linux a lot that when I work for a long time with a lot of things opened… my RAM fill up and never get down.
I heard it had to do with swap, can you quickly explain why?
Its more likely caching. They just keep the cache of files opened earlier so that its ready for you if you need it immediately again. Also unused ram is wasted ram
Appreciate this. I have a Chromebook running Garuda with only 4gb of RAM, and if I get too much going the system locks up. This might help it handle things better.
I feel like recently developed games and apps expect the user to have a "moden" sized RAM, meaning that the decs don't give a crap about optimizing RAM-usage.
I remember building my gaming machine in 2008 and put 4GB (2x2) in, then RAM prices tanked 6 months later so I added another 4GB. I remember having lots of conversations where I was like "yeah, 8GB is over kill" but what I didn't expect is that it was such overkill that when I built my next machine in 2012, I still only put 8GB on it.
It wasn't until 2019 that I built a machine and put 16GB in it. I ran on 8GB for over a decade. Pretty impressive for gaming.
In 2008 a lot of most software was still 32 bit, you couldn't use more than 4GiB per process. In that sense anything more than that was overkill unless you used a lot of programs at the same time and your OS supported physical address extension (PAE).
All windows and Linux versions I've run since 2008 supported 64 bit. The games I was running might not have, but I can't really be held responsible for what they want to write. Also, multitasking has always been a thing, and chrome came out in 2008 as well, so the single task 4GB limitations hasn't really been an issue for a while as far as gaming/regular desktop usage goes(unless, again, the applications you're running aren't written to support 64bit/more than 4GB, which you can't really be held responsible for.)
I too have 8gb and I hate it ( although i do use a lot of browser tabs on second screen it just isnt enough if you wanna do something else on the side :prolly can even do with 4 if I really limited myself and hated every second of it but even 8 isn't good enough
8 is enough if you're not multitasking too much
wanna play a game? close absolutely everything except maybe discord (if you need it), but keep it in the tray
wanna look sth up while playing? don't forget to close the browser afterwards
yeah I agree thats why i said i hate every second of it ( coz without movies or second screen browser everything gets really boring even the most engaging games ( ofc any newer game is out of the question )
I ran my old machine also from 2010 till this year on 8gb. Also for gaming the 2010 i7 was quite fine. The only bottleneck was the VRAM where we somehow went from 1GB being perfectly suitable to 4GB being barely enough. Meanwhile old games sometimes look better than modern games, because they actually put effort into optimizing the graphics.
Am I the only one around here that maxes out their RAM to the max that the board will take? Sure 128 Gig is overkill now, but the 32 Gig I installed in my last laptop was supposed to be overkill just 3 years ago. I did manage to use my previous laptop for a whole 12 years with only 16 Gig.
I installed 64 GB of RAM in my Windows laptop 4 years ago and had been using 64 GB of RAM in the laptop that it replaced - which was from 2013 (I think I bought it in 2014-2105). I was using 32 GB of RAM prior (on Linux and Windows laptops), all the way back to 2007 or so.
My work MacBook Pros generally have 32-64 GB of RAM, but my personal MacBook Air (the 15” M2) has 16 GB, simply because the upgrade wasn’t a cost effective one (and the M1 before it had performed great with 16) and because I’d only planned on using it for casual development. But since I’ve been using it as my main personal development machine and for self-hosted AI, and have run into its limits, when I replace it I’ll likely opt for 64 GB or more.
My Windows gaming desktop only has 32 GB of RAM, though - that’s because getting the timings higher with more RAM - particularly 4 sticks - was prohibitively expensive when I built it, and then when the cost wasn’t a concern and I tried to upgrade, I learned that my third and fourth RAM slots weren’t functional. I could upgrade to 64 GB in two slots but it wouldn’t really be worth it, since I only use it for gaming.
My Linux desktop / server has 128 GB of ECC RAM, though, because that’s as much as the motherboard supported.
I have no problems currently on my personal computer with 16GB. If RAM is ever an issue, you can always upgrade (especially if you leave slots empty). Plus RAM generally has a tendency to get cheaper over time, so why waste money now?
never had issues with gnome on my laptop with 4 gbs of ddr3, actually it's pretty smooth even while running from an 8 year old 5200rpm hdd, even with all the animations and stuff enabled.
freezes a bit while loading icons in the app menu for the first time after boot but it's really usable once everything gets cached to ram.
Your experience matches mine more than op's. In fact I have a super shitty old laptop running gnome on fedora with a 32gb drive and I think 4 GB of RAM, maybe less, and it still sounds better than the experience they're claiming to have had with 6 gb ram.
this was a few years back around gnome 41 maybe, who knows if things have changed since then or if something was just really wrong with my install. can’t really test anymore because i kind of already upgraded the pc
yeah you need to mess around with snappiness to avoid that
(so either increase it to make it unload stuff to hdd earlier, leaving more ram for critical stuff, or decrease it to like 5 in order to make it only use swap when absolutely needed)
basically just mess around with it and see what value works best. i my case 10-15 works more or less okay-ish under full ram load
Yeah, I'm with you there, but I'm also a believer in having a little more ram than you need. After a couple of decades of feeling that occasional bottleneck it seems like a relatively cheap prevention measure.
horrible take IMO. firefox is using 12GB for me right now, but you have no idea how many or what kind of tabs either of us have, which makes all the difference to the point your comment has no value whatsoever.
How come it has no value? I used to run Chrome but now I run Firefox. My browsing habits have not changed yet the memory consumption has greatly improved. It may not have any value to you but it certainly was a valuable experience for me and I made the comment hoping that it might find someone who is in the same situation as I was. I've got nothing to prove and nothing to gain. Anyone may run their own experiment.
but you have no idea how many or what kind of tabs either of us have,
Can't speak for you but I certainly do have an idea of how many and what kind of tabs I have and how many and what kind of tabs I used to have in Chrome.
would certainly love to see your side by side comparison of a large difference in memory usage between the two using the same tabs and no extensions with up to date versions.
I’m not the person you responded to, but I can say that it’s a perfectly fine take. My personal experience and the commonly voiced opinions about both browsers supports this take.
Unless you’re using 5 tabs max at a time, my personal experience is that Firefox is more than an order of magnitude more memory efficient than Chrome when dealing with long-lived sessions with the same number of tabs (dozens up to thousands).
I keep hundreds of tabs open in Firefox on my personal machine (with 16 GB of RAM) and it’s almost never consuming the most memory on my system.
Policy prohibits me running Firefox on my work computer, so I have to use Chrome. Even with much more memory (both on 32 GB and 64 GB machines) and far fewer tabs (20-30 at most vs 200-300), Chrome often ends up taking up far too much memory + having a substantial performance drop, and I have to to through and prune the tabs I don’t need right now, bookmark things that can be done later, etc..
In my experience of switching from Chrome to Firefox in the last year thanks to Lemmy, I have to say that using FF for work comes with all sorts of performance issues.
Then again, my specific use case includes having ~10 windows open at ~20 tabs each, sometimes even more. Definitely pushing the limits of the browser lol
I just took a Core i5, 6 GB RAM laptop from 2011 and reinstalled Linux Mint and put in a 1 TB SSD. The difference between that and Ubuntu 23.10 and a 750 GB 5400 RPM drive was like night and day.
Transcoding an HDR blueray to h265 filled it up pretty quick and I'm about to start dabbling with game development/3d modeling.
I've also filled it up pretty quick learning how fast various data structures are in which situations. You don't really see a difference in speed until you get into the billions of items at least for python.
For automations and small apps it's fast enough. It's a fair traidoff for the fast turnaround time.
I'm thinking of learning go or c though because i don't care much for the runtime errors. It's no fun using an application for a while just for a typo in a rarely used function to tank the entire app.
That that to the 3000 browser tabs I have open, two instances of VS code, the multithreaded python app I’m running and developing, the several-gigabytes large dataset that’s active in memory.
