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Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

8GB of RAM is about $50 right now. If you have to replace that every $2 years, are you really complaining about the cost of $25 per year on your $1,000 computer system? It's a rounding error.

Chrome, in particular, is generally be used for far more tabs (I have like 30 open right now on a MacBook Air) and increasingly complex web sites every year. It's easy to look at memory usage and complain, but the fact is that our usage and the size of the pages we're loading is also rising rapidly. If you loaded Chrome from two years ago and used it how you work today, you might not find the memory footprint that much better than the current version.

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>If you have to replace that every $2 years, are you really complaining about the cost of $25 per year on your $1,000 computer system?

That's assuming you're using a computer with user upgradeable RAM, and not a new macbook pro.

This is where the physical waste really gets bad to me. I'm not weighing in on this discussion as far as more RAM vs better binaries because /I want both/.

But if you have to buy a whole new machine every two years when they only pieces of hardware that are getting better should be upgradeable (ram & display) it's pretty disheartening.

Even if you don't have replaceable RAM, you're still replacing your computer at some regular interval. It just means you have to buy the computer with more RAM than you would if it wasn't upgradeable (which was true anyway.) That's part of the cost of buying a computer where you can't upgrade the RAM.

If it's not upgradeable then it's disposable. Get the new one next time.

You say that as if MBPs have no resale value.

The ram upgrade procedure for the new MBPs is backup, Craigslist, Apple Store, restore.

I'd love to be able to upgrade my laptop RAM like that. Laptop CPU and motherboard manufacturers are still quite stingy about the maximum RAM they support. This limit is the only reason I had to buy a new laptop last year, and why I will likely need to buy another one in a few more years. A laptop sold today should support up to 2x64GB DDR3 RAM[1], but typical Ivy Bridge laptops only go up to 2x16GB, and a year ago it was max 2x4GB or for higher-end 2x8GB. The laptop I replaced had max total 3.2GB (you could put in 2x2GB DDR2 but the system would only see about 3.2GB, so I stuck to 2GB+1GB). Its 2007 Core 2 Duo is still blazingly fast, and its disk was easy to upgrade to an SSD.

[1] One can't easily buy a 64GB DIMM today, but Moore's Law is swift and mighty.

It's not about the money, it's about the complete disregard of quality. The applications we create should only use the resources they need.

If hogging lots of RAM makes my program legitimately run better, then that's what it should do! Chrome runs a process per domain (or something like that) for security and stability reasons. That adds a lot of overhead for lots of tabs. But that's OK because there's actually a reason for using all that RAM.

>If hogging lots of RAM makes my program legitimately run better

It objectively doesn't make your program run better to waste RAM.

If RAM usage goes up 2x every two years but RAM and hard drive speed go up 20% in the same time period, then using more RAM when you don't need it is making programs more sluggish to start and to suspend to disk, and it's making computers draw more power while sleeping (to keep that much RAM alive -- the D in DRAM means every bit in the RAM needs to be refreshed continuously).

Objectively? That's a dangerous word; I hope you've got a better argument than this one. Hard drives are being rapidly replaced by SSDs, so their speed just jumped _way_ up (especially start-up and random access times, which affect sleeping and waking performance). 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, not 20%.

SSDs are great. But I have exactly one hard drive bay in my laptop, and it currently holds >580Gb of data. Some of that is bloat, but MOST of it is real data; I have lots of raw video, source art for games, music, and many folders of compiled object files. I'm a game developer, so I use a lot of hard drive.

From what I've read, an SSD has an expected life of about 1-2 years. Aside from not being able to afford $2500 JUST for an SSD to hold my data [1], I can't fathom paying that much every 1-2 years as the drives die. Not to mention downtime and potential lost data (between the back-up and the failure).

I'd love to have an SSD. In a year or two, I probably will, as the costs will likely drop.

But until then, yes, the performance has objectively dropped.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-2-5-Inch-Performance-OC...

> the complete disregard of quality

Quality is measured on multiple axes. RAM use is only one of them. CPU use is another, for example, and it's often the case that reducing CPU use requires increasing RAM use.

Total page size as measured by the http archive project is currently growing 20% per year on average. Any benefit to be had by chrome's speed-ups is lost many times over by web designers bloating their pages. The web is becoming slower to use.

http://httparchive.org/trends.php?s=All&minlabel=Mar+15+...

And yes, that's pure raw bloat. Sites haven't gotten richer content the past 2 years, they've just put on some weight.

What are you guys talking about? My main machine has 1.25GB of RAM and is 10 years old.

Sure I don't use it for modern gaming and sure I've delegated tasks to much stronger uni machines a few times in the past but other than the occasional hw problems due to age it still works and is mostly enough...

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