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Comment by dmlittle | Hacker News Reader

Is it high? Yes. Is it completely wasteful? Debatable.

Looking at the memory utilization of my VS Code installation with all of the extension I have is currently using just shy of 200MB. Most entry level laptops today come with 8GB of memory. 200MB out of the 8GB is ~2.5% of the total memory available. If you have 16GB that drops it down to ~1.25%. Yes, vim will use much less memory but let's not pretend you're going to be using all of that memory doing something else (and if you are, you're the edge case). Most of the time it will stay idle, you might as well use it if it's a program you're more comfortable and productive with.

I'm not saying that I'm OK with the amount of resources Chrome and Electron apps utilize but the argument that we don't have enough memory for a few of them, specifically the ones that you use on your day-to-day work is honestly not a strong one.

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I agree that with the number you gave (200MB for a primary work tool) it's not that big of an issue, but in general, I strongly disagree with this argument:

> but let's not pretend you're going to be using all of that memory doing something else (and if you are, you're the edge case)

Of course I'm going to be using all that memory. For work, besides the IDE, I also have to run a mail client, an IM client and a browser, and likely a host of other developer tools. Every now and then, I may need to run a build, at which point the resource usage of the computer spikes. If, together, this exceeds available resources, something will have to give. Most likely, everything will slow down, and the SSD wear will increase.

For non-programmer specialists, the same applies, just with different software.

For regular users, the same applies, just with different software and much less resources.

It's the peak usage that matters, not the average. Wasteful software limits the amount of things that can be done on a computer simultaneously. So it's not "we shouldn't care about our software's resource use because users don't do multiple things at a time". It's "users don't do multiple things at a time because they can't, because we don't care about resource utilization".

> It's the peak usage that matters, not the average. Wasteful software limits the amount of things that can be done on a computer simultaneously. So it's not "we shouldn't care about our software's resource use because users don't do multiple things at a time". It's "users don't do multiple things at a time because they can't, because we don't care about resource utilization".

Sure, but how many applications are you running? Let's say you have 20 applications running at 200MB each that's 4GB (50%) of your available memory with an extra 4GB for spiky workloads (if you have 16GB it drops to 25% available memory usage).

We're comparing vim (and other editors) with tools created 25 years later. The available resources back then and now are drastically different. The joke of emacs meaning "Eight Mb And Constantly Swapping" is because most computers back then only had 8MB of memory. In terms of memory consumption emacs utilized 100% back in the day compared to the 2.5% of VSCode today but people don't shit on emacs.

I don't want to come off as someone dismissing vim (and other editors). I personally use vim/tmux on a daily basis but I'm also fond of using IDEs like VSCode/IntelliJ/etc. There is a huge portion of the internet that thinks that these new editors are shitty because of their memory consumption when it is not really a good argument in 2021.

> Sure, but how many applications are you running? Let's say you have 20 applications running at 200MB each that's 4GB (50%) of your available memory with an extra 4GB for spiky workloads (if you have 16GB it drops to 25% available memory usage).

A bunch. Most of them in the background. A lot of them in browser tabs. Good chunk of them use way more than 200MB.

Some applications a typical person may be running that will each use more than 200MB of RAM: garbage audio "control panel" that came with the driver, garbage video card "control panel" that came with the driver, Skype, Steam/Origin/GOG/Ubisoft Connect/EA whatsthename, possibly all of them at once. Facebook (in browser). Messenger (in browser). GMail (in browser). Couple of news articles (in browser). That's all before starting to look at whatever the user currently needs to run to accomplish their goals.

A different example: two years ago, I had a desktop with 8GB of RAM, on which I worked on a software project (remote job). I had it running Linux and trimmed of most of RAM-consuming things, and still I could only run three things - Emacs, our backend, and a web browser with our frontend, Slack and some HN threads. Anything above that would exhaust available RAM. Slack Desktop was out of the question. That's how I discovered Ripcord - turns out you can write a perfectly functional and ergonomic Slack client with close to zero memory footprint, if you give a shit.

Of course I upgraded my machine as soon as I saved up some spare cash, and I sport 32 GB of RAM. And guess what, I've managed to exhaust that too! Thanks to software having memory leaks. The difference between 32GB and 8GB is that I can run some software for 8 hours vs. just one, before having to restart it.

I could go on, but I'll also end with this point: 4GB of RAM is still frequently seen in cheap laptops sold today, and of course common in laptops sold few years ago. This is the kind of hardware a typical non-tech person is going to have. Software bloat directly limits their ability to multitask on their machines.

FWIW, I'm not dismissing VSCode because it uses 200MB more of RAM than it should. It's a pretty lean piece of software for the features it sports. But most modern software is not like that.

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