Hacker News Reader

Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

Memory is not a precious resource, this narrative needs to die an unceremonious death.

This isn't the 90s, we live in the future.

Of course it is a precious resource. Any bytes wasted by bloated electron apps are bytes that your kernel cannot use for disk caches.

Pretty much every file I use daily is always in my disk cache, but they won't all fit there if I run a bunch of electron apps.

False choice; you have memory for both Electron apps and your kernel for disk caching.

Besides, with SSDs and NVMe your experience loading data from disk is plenty fast. Again, this is the future; I/O isn’t the bottleneck it once was.

Just because you haven't personally experienced this problem doesn't mean that many others have not. The experience of others is just as valuable as your personal experience, and to denigrate the experiences of others demonstrates a lack of empathy and understanding. Not everyone has an SSD, and not everyone has more than 8GB memory in their laptops. Many laptop manufacturers (including Apple) continue to sell lower-memory systems in droves; and there is a widely-installed base of older computers dating 5 years and even longer.

My point is that, in 2022, the overwhelming majority of people do have the necessary resources required to run Electron apps on their laptops and desktops.

My view is backed up by the fact that people do exactly this, with great success. The complaint about memory is not reflective of the typical user experience.

The fact that multiple people here are telling you that they have experienced RAM shortages and swapping due to excessive consumption speaks for itself.

The fact that you think a small handful of anecdotes is a meaningful or representative sample size speaks for itself.

Then please show us the data that backs you up.

No, you've been hostile and non-cooperative this whole time, my allocation for time spent with people like that is more or less up.

If you're actually curious, you can figure it out for yourself.

That was a very evasive way of saying, "I don't have it." Thanks for playing, though!

The fact that you need me to "show data" that Moore's Law exists is, in and of itself, hostile, but on top of that this comment pretty solidly demonstrates that my intuition is correct.

You are the one who came in here and disputed my claim (and those of others as well) without a single shred of evidence. You still refuse to substantiate your disagreement.

Nobody is disputing Moore's Law (and this is the first time you've brought it up!). The dispute is around whether people still experience slowdowns and other bad experiences as a result of excessive memory consumption relative to resources, despite Moore's Law. I and several other people have told you right here that they have, and you refuse to acknowledge our collective experience largely because you personally haven't shared this experience.

My ego isn't bruised. But I and others reasonably expect significantly more than a "drive-by" non-substantive negation of a claim that comes directly from personal and professional experience (i.e., gaslighting) -- especially on Hacker News, where the audience is supposed to be largely composed of mathematicians, scientists, and others who possess better-than-average ability to think deeply, logically, and in a nuanced fashion.

You are wrong when you say, "Memory is a precious resource." No "precious resource" doubles every two years. You can either accept that objective fact, or you can continue to try and weasel your way around it, but the fact will remain.

First, average primary system memory in a typical laptop does not double every two years. Growth of average installed memory has been linear, not exponential (see, e.g., https://techtalk.pcmatic.com/research-charts-memory/). Second, even if it did grow, software can consume memory faster than it can be provisioned; there's no law that prevents software developers from writing software that utilizes an arbitrary amount of memory. Put differently, adding more memory does not necessarily ensure the software will not consume it, in the same way that adding more freeway lanes is not a guarantee that gridlock will not ensue, or that moving from an apartment into a mansion is not a guarantee that it won't get filled with stuff.

Aaand now you've gone on to dispute Moore's Law, as if the specificity of the "two years" part was at all critical or even important to our conversation.

Also, that link you provided seriously undercuts your own argument, you do realize that right? It very clearly shows how over 90%+ of computers have 4 GB or more of memory installed, which is plenty to run multiple Electron apps.

I encourage you to read my argument from the top again. I speak in terms of probabilities, not absolutes. I don't disagree that many people might not notice performance degradation when running multiple Electron apps. However, it is an incontrovertible fact that (all other things being equal) an Electron app will consume more memory than a native app will; and some people will experience swapping and reduced performance when running Electron apps where they might not experience that if they were solely running native apps instead. Also, it's important to keep in mind that people often run a healthy mix of apps at once--both native and Electron--and they'd have the ability to run more of them without risking swapping if they ran fewer Electron apps (again, all other things being equal). The closer you get to exhaustion, the more economy of consumption really matters.

I just can't see how this is that controversial a claim.

What you have here is not a controversial claim. It's also not what you've been arguing until this moment, but for whatever reason you've softened your position substantially, now to the point of (IMO) banality.

What's controversial (because it's false) is the claim that, "Memory is a precious resource." That is not a true statement.

We call memory a "precious resource" because it is often a fixed quantity in a given computer, and often the most expensive component after the display unit. Many laptops these days do not offer upgradeable memory, and even when they do, they often have very few slots in which to add it. So for many people, an upgrade involves an entire unit replacement at significant cost. I think most people understand this, so again, I don't see how it's particularly controversial.

Humans are not limited to one computer in their lifetime, so the resources of one computer at one moment in time are not relevant to this discussion.

Additionally, your own citation shows that at this moment in time a vanishingly small number of computers have an amount of memory that would result in any kind of performance degradation due to the use of one or a few Electron apps.

Therefore, Moore's Law applies, and we can safely say that resources which double every two years are not scarce.

Your continued insistence on a false fact will continue to be "controversial".

This discussion has never been about whether the aggregate amount of computer memory in the world is a fixed quantity. (At least, that's not what I meant to discuss, or how I think most people would interpret my claim.) It's about the impact on real people who have laptops with fixed amounts of memory in their hands today.

The impact on real people who have laptops is low because the aggregate amount of computer memory in the world is doubling every two years.

It doubled, people bought new laptops, and reaped those benefits by running multiple Electron apps seamlessly on those new laptops.

So it remains a false statement to say, "Memory is a precious resource."

Anyone with a system that is running full of Electron apps knows how awful it adds up and how slow they are. Sure just 1 app makes hardly a difference. But I have 16GB of RAM and it gets awfully slow very fast with all that electron mess.

Anyone? I am a member of that set and I will report it is not “awful” at all.

I use 5-7 Electron apps on a daily basis and not even once have I had anything resembling memory issues. Nothing gets slow, nothing becomes unusable.

As someone who has to occasionally unstick stuck systems by way of `echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` because memory management in the real world doesn't work the way the people who write condescending sites like linuxatemyram.com say it does:

Memory most definitely is a previous resource.

What’s funny about this comment is how detached from reality it is.

If you round, approximately zero users of Electron apps know how to do what you’re talking about, and yet they continue to successfully use Electron apps across a variety of platforms.

The fact that you have to finely manage your system’s memory is a you thing, not an Electron thing. The two are entirely orthogonal.

Memory is not a precious resource, no matter how much you want to live in a world where your obsessive compulsion to manage it is reasonable.

Was it really necessary to have the rude and condescending attitude? While it served the point of illustrating the toxic behavior I took issue with of those who claim memory management is Fine(tm), I don't think it was warranted here.

I only care about managing my memory because the consequences of running out of free memory are severe. Linux as shipped by mainstream distros is quite happy to start filling swap (with attendant kswapd CPU usage) when there's multiple gigabytes of pointless inode/dentry cache to evict.

Both of these are problems that simply don't exist on Windows and MacOS. Windows because it doesn't pretend half of my system RAM is useful cache, MacOS because it does compression out of the box and doesn't appear to be so aggressive.

On each and every point your view is only true in very isolated and niche situations, while simultaneously begging the question that you’ve run out of memory in the first place.

Linux is not good for desktop environments for exactly the reasons you outline here (and many more). It’s not Electron’s fault you’ve used the wrong tool for your desktop OS.

It's very antisocial to tell people they're using the wrong tools. In today's world, it's becoming no longer sustainable to respond to wasted resources by asking the world to purchase more resources (resulting in even more waste in the long term) to accommodate it. Conservation is becoming increasingly important.

Is it antisocial to tell someone they're being antisocial?

And you're using the words "wasted" wrong, assuming you're referring to the memory footprint of Electron. Electron uses memory to solve a compatibility problem, that's not wasted at all.

One person's benefit is another person's waste. If you think there's not room for vehement disagreement around how best to use space, go watch an episode of Hoarders.

Then why is your cloud provider charging by GB-secs? This is the future after all.

Please elaborate to those of us who have actually experienced the “swap swamp” within the last year, in the 2020s, and who have enough systems knowledge to properly instrument this stuff. Are you gaslighting us?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com