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timeon

> these days

Are you referring to current RAM prices or bloat of numerous Electron apps?

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A $130 Motorola smartphone has 8GB of RAM. This will save 0.5% RAM. It's fairly negligible on modern systems.

130USD for 8GB RAM will be a good price for a bare DIMM in two weeks.

I can sell you 16 GB DIMMs today for less than 2x that so that you can profit.

These days you’re getting 4GB at that price point and you’re losing memory to the OS thus user space memory is even more constrained.

Smartphone producers already announced to cut ram this year... Just FYI

4GB of that taken by the system. more memory use with runtimes also means more cpu to track and free memory.

Now multiply that across all apps/services/extensions/profiles and it adds up.

This kind of lazy thinking is why today’s software is so bloated and slow.

It adds up but it would require to rewrite all software, which would be pretty costly.

I agree with the sentiment but it's a bit too late now.

The problem is with how software is designed around being cheap to write.

It's so much cheaper to optimize now than before.

What is this based on? Could you expand on this a bit?

Just personal experience using LLMs. I've optimized a lot of things in the past year I wouldn't normally have time to do, especially build systems/pipelines.

It's just Brave browser, you don't multiply by the number of every kind of service

With your attitude towards improving one piece of software, it becomes every piece of software.

It's more than that, because generally performance is also much worse if you're using a shit ton of memory. That's because CPUs are bottlenecked by cache. So more memory means cache has to be flushed more often, and there will be more misses, which can greatly impact performance.

OK now do the math for someone who has 200 tabs open. Remember that basically all browsers these days spin up one process per tab.

Modern browsers don't keep those 200 tabs in active memory. Hasn't been the case for over a decade.

But they do keep the active tab of each window in memory. Firefox even continues rendering all active tabs in all windows, even if for windows which are not visible.

Not sure if this 45MB is per browser instance or per tab, but it’s the latter case, 10 windows would save 450MB. >10% on a lower-end device.

"Saving X% of RAM" isn't a thing because RAM is itself a cache of compressed swap space and/or mapped files.

The lesson here is pointer-chasing data structures and trees are a lot more expensive than everyone and most programming languages like to pretend they are.

This kind of attitude is why everything is so bloated nowadays...

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