What's the point of having a tonne of ram only to let it sit idle?
I "only" have 4 gb of ram and chrome is taking up 1.2 gb of that, even though i have 12 windows open with ~5 tabs in each.
The problem is that an extension like "1-Up for Google+" doesn't need 20 MiB of RAM just to play a sound and display a green mushroom, for a total of about 150 KiB of assets and maybe a few KiB of code.
You'd be surprised how big uncompressed data can get, compare a .BMP with a .PNG of the same image for example.
2 seconds of uncompressed sound, at 44.1 kHz, in stereo and 8 bits per sample is 170 KiB. 17 images of on average 24 by 24 pixels at 32 bits per pixel is 68 KiB. Three other, bigger images give another 40 KiB of uncompressed data. A total ~280 KiB. There's a few KiB of HTML but I don't know whether and how I should count that. Even if we take into account headers, padding, objects and higher quality data (e.g. 16 bits per sample), I assume all assets will still account for less than half a megabyte.
Now that I look at the code, I see it's including a bundled version of jQuery. I don't know how big the representation of Javascript code is in memory, but 29 MiB seems a bit much (correction, while I was typing this, it went to 31 MiB).
It might seems disingenuous to single out this extensions, but truth to be told all my extensions need a similar, way too high amount of private memory.
If it causes the load of another library which nothing else was using that could count especially if it's a different version of jquery etc.
If 2 processes are both using the same library and it is linked to their addresses spaces, who's memory usage does it count against?
Apps don't generally change their behavior based on the size of physical RAM, but maybe Chrome does this as a very advanced optimization.
Let's say you load up you video editing program, maybe it only needs 512MB of memory to fit the whole program into memory, now what happens when you load in LOTR directors cut?
Especially if you aren't running any other large programs, would it still make sense to restrict it to 300MB (or 1GB , or 2GB etc)?
I think it's safer to assume that OS developers know what they are doing and can be trusted to handle memory contention issues better than most of us can.
As an aside some programs (like redis , memcached etc) do allow you to restrict the amount of RAM which they use but this is because they are explicitly greedy with memory and are probably used by people with enough skills to measure actual usage and tune accordingly.
I don't necessarily. I just know how much RAM I want to be able to give it.
I'd love to be able to test apps in lower-RAM scenarios. Just because I've got 8g or 16g doesn't mean everyone does, but I have no way to test what that experience will be like.
Additionally, I may have two processes that are both rather RAM hungry that I need to run. Give me the option of constraining one of them so that I can give RAM priority to one or the other rather than "oh, well the OS people are smarter than me, so I guess I have to trust that app 1 will get RAM priority over app 2, or they'll just both have to be equal".
Although you should bear in mind that computers with less memory probably have less everything else (including slower memory busses) so your best bet is to actually find a slower computer and test with that.
Most OSes will let you prioritize other processes over others (e.g Linux has "nice"), whether this is just for CPU preemption priority or whether it does other resources as well I'm not sure.
However I think most swapping systems will try and keep the most frequently used pages in RAM , so if one process has preemption priority over another this problem would solve itself as it's memory area would just get accessed more often.
Again this is kind of finger in the air stuff so anyone more familiar with OS design should feel free to correct me.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium_Tips_and_Tweak...