Poll of the Day > Why does computer RAM get completely eaten up in today's computers?

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/7/9/AASfTXAACqZ7.jpg

poorly optimized software. I am pretty sure Chrome is percentage based. Back when I had 128gigs of RAM Chrome would use something like 40 gigs and only have two tabs open.

That or they are using our computers for mesh computing.

Because it's there

I just figured it was memory leaks

Mostly because there's such a surplus of it that developers rarely put much effort into optimizing its usage. RAM is very, very rarely the bottleneck for computers these days, so you get websites/browsers in particular being pretty lazy about trying not to use too much of it.

I never had a problem with 16GB and never have a problem with 32GB.

I recommend this video for an explanation:
https://youtu.be/W6fZt-P_bDk

From what I understand, it has to do with code that is not really optimized to use the available memory efficiently.

because it's cheaper to make a bloated program and more ram than it is to make an efficient program and less ram

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

while i havnt either (64gb), i do find it disturbing how firefox sometimes uses 10gb for nothing.

hypnox posted...

poorly optimized software.

adjl posted...

Mostly because there's such a surplus of it that developers rarely put much effort into optimizing its usage.

This.

Back in the day you had to be efficient when coding because anything too bloated or memory-leaky wouldn't run on computers with much less memory. But now most computers have enough memory that devs have stopped giving a shit, so multiple poorly optimized programs overlap and eat up resources.

Just download more RAM like everyone else

It Bill Gates electronic fetus growing inside.

Like others have said, modern companies don't care about optimization. Also, many people are idiots and just buy ram that simply isn't a good match for their CPU, effectively losing performance.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/3/0/AAFUswAACsca.jpg

Metalsonic66 posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/3/0/AAFUswAACsca.jpg

https://youtu.be/dRWVJXOkMXI?t=7

Chrome isn't too bad about using RAM but Firefox has been horrible about it since version 1.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/4/4/AAQwHjAACsco.png

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/4/5/AAQwHjAACscp.png

(And I'm not joking about memory usage being an issue since version 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20090624202020/http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174909795 )

captpackrat posted...

Chrome isn't too bad about using RAM but Firefox has been horrible about it since version 1.

Chrome is just horrible about lots of other things.

RAM has always been an issue in PCs because seemingly you can never have enough ram and as programs become more intense, that puts pressure on PC components to handle the load.

captpackrat posted...

Chrome isn't too bad about using RAM but Firefox has been horrible about it since version 1.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/4/4/AAQwHjAACsco.png

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/4/5/AAQwHjAACscp.png

(And I'm not joking about memory usage being an issue since version 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20090624202020/http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174909795 )

I never had any problems with Firefox back then. It wasn't until they fucked up with plugin container.

People use too many third party libraries that they don't understand.

I have on average 400 chrome tabs open at any given time

Gotta love when I stream music all day and my RAM usage is at 90%, then I close the Firefox tab I was streaming music from and magically get back 10GB.

Going to the moon isn't a computational problem, and RAM is for loading common assets quickly. The more unique elements and the higher quality those elements are, the more ram is consumed at any moment.

adjl posted...

Mostly because there's such a surplus of it that developers rarely put much effort into optimizing its usage. RAM is very, very rarely the bottleneck for computers these days, so you get websites/browsers in particular being pretty lazy about trying not to use too much of it.

This is the answer. Today everything is all about how easy to understand the code is - not about optimizing for performance.

If I open two Firefox windows with two of the IP security cameras at work my laptop becomes nearly unusable and the fans run at full blast. My laptop has 32 GB of RAM.

To think optimization is so important, it's pretty much the same reason video games nowadays aren't compressed like they are in the old days

the big thing I think is media (audio/video). it's hard to use tons of memory, even hard drive space, until you start handling media, and then things immediately explode.

All the code and data for the game Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800 fits into 8,192 bytes of ROM and requires only 8K of RAM.

Sahuagin posted...

the big thing I think is media (audio/video). it's hard to use tons of memory, even hard drive space, until you start handling media, and then things immediately explode.

Media and the whole "HD" craze has gotten so big now and takes up so much data but storage space hasn't come anywhere close to keeping up, it's still like only 1-4 TB when individual files can be 50-100GB now!

visiny posted...

Media and the whole "HD" craze has gotten so big now and takes up so much data but storage space hasn't come anywhere close to keeping up, it's still like only 1-4 TB when individual files can be 50-100GB now!

What are you talking about? Internal hard drives are huge now.

RAM has always been an issue because as newer programs and hardware comes out, it demands more RAM.