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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

But what do you even mean "run out"? This is what I don't get.

If you have multiple browsers with hundreds of tabs, the majority of those tabs are probably swapped out to your SSD already.

With swapfiles and SSD's, physical memory is less and less relevant except when you're performing very specific computational tasks that actually require everything to be simultaneously in memory -- things like highly complex video effects rendering.

How do you measure "running out" of your 24 GiB? And what happens when you do "run out"?

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As a human, when I have many tabs open, I observe that everything gets really slow. All applications get slow, but especially the browser.

So I put on my engineering hat and pull up Activity Monitor and further observe (a) high memory pressure, (b) high memory consumption attributed to Chrome or Firefox, (c) high levels of swap usage, (d) high levels of disk I/O attributed to kerneltask or nothing, depending on macOS version, which is the swapper task.

I close some tabs. I then observe that the problems go away.

Swap isn't a silver bullet, not even at 3Gbytes/sec. It is slow. I haven't even touched on GPU memory pressure which swaps back to sysram, which puts further pressure on disk swap.

It's slow.

It's the equivalent of having 50 stacks of paper documents & magazines sitting unorganized on your desk and complaining about not having space to work on.

A bigger desk is not the solution to this problem.

Some of us like our big loaded desks! No one really complained in this thread, just saying some of us will utilize a lot more memory than others.

If your tabs are swapped out to SSD, your computer feels incredibly _slow_. SSD are fast, yeah, but multiple orders of magnitude slower than the slowest RAM module.

You can run 4GB if you're fine with having most of your applications swapped out, but the experience will be excruciating.

Physical memory is still as relevant as it was 30 years ago. No offense but if you can't see the problem, you probably have never used a computer with enough RAM to fit everything in memory + have enough spare for file caching.

I don't swap. You can do all your arguments about why I should if you want but yes, there are legit reasons not to and there is such a thing as running out of memory in 2020.

That's fine for you, but then it's disingenous for you to post your example without mentioning that.

It makes it unrepresentative and doesn't contribute anything useful to the conversation about memory requirements for normal operation.

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