[K.I.L.E.R]

Every time a new piece of software comes out people whine about it eating up too much memory. I have 4GB of RAM and a quad core, why not let applications use it?

Chrome for instance is far more responsive than Firefox 3 or IE on my PC, it loads instantly (without any noticeable delay) and it uses memory and processing that I have available. Why are people whinging over x amounts of memory being used?

I can't wait until software goes widespread with parallel processing. Why constrain a system with a lot of resources to using an insignificant amount? People judge a software application by the amount of memory it uses. When I see a piece of software these days that uses jack all memory I think that it isn't the most efficient software because it makes little use of available resources.

What about building applications that scale with the available resources?

[Florin]

I can't agree, software that is lean is sexy.

On the other hand, unused memory is wasted memory, and if aggressive caching helps an application perform, by all means do it.

But be sure to give back the memory to the OS as soon as possible, so it in turn can use it for cache.

[Davros]

Originally Posted by K.I.L.E.R

I have 4GB of RAM and a quad core

And most people dont

[Nesh]

People are annoyed because some programs eat more memory unnecessarily and they often end up running slower because of that. They arent as memory efficient as they should have been

[Arwin]

Part of the whole point of Chrome is to prevent memory fragmentation and leaking.

In general, software should be as lean as possible. If they grow as computer capability grows, that means I still have to keep closing applications I'm working with in order to free up memory. Which sucks. Also, I work with VMWare a lot. Eats memory for breakfast, but it's worth it. However, if applications are made to be lean and mean, then I can run VMWare's easier, make snapshots or suspend faster, run more of them at once, etc.

Always benefits. Of course not all projects have time and resources to make their applications lean and mean, but there are a lot of them that would benefit from being a bit more careful with RAM. Including, obviously, Windows, Office (which did improve a bit after 2000/XP), etc.

[zed]

whilst I do agree if the memories there use it if necessary

the thing is memory + speed are often linked, as in less memory used, often collerates to a faster application due to increased likelyhood of data fitting in cache etc

[Fred]

I can't really tell the difference between browser speed to be honest. IE is fine.

The biggest issue for me is that all the malware made for IE/PC ends up forcing me to run tons of little antivirus/preventers in the background, which is why I moved to Firefox.

Of course people caught on, and now thats getting to be just as bad.

[Davros]

so move to opera

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by K.I.L.E.R

Chrome for instance is far more responsive than Firefox 3 or IE on my PC, it loads instantly (without any noticeable delay) and it uses memory and processing that I have available. Why are people whinging over x amounts of memory being used?

Chrome actually uses less memory after you've been browsing the web for a while, particularly if you've been using lots of windows/tabs (which I do).

I've been using Chrome for a little bit, and I have to say I really like it.

[Blazkowicz]

Firefox and OpenOffice are two big apps whose relatively heavy memory usage I tolerate, because they are very useful, free and ubiquitous. also web browsing uses a memory amount roughly correlated to the amount of content.

Then I wouldn't want a music player, media player or IM app using 100MB ram or more.
512MB ram is the sweet spot for running both firefox, OOo and loads of small footprint stuff, leaving vista and crapware aside. Doing a bit of publishing and image editing isn't a problem.
it's also a sweet spot in another way : very common and cheaply achievable ram size, from three-year-old P4 systems to eight-year-old computers easily upgraded with one or two sticks, through still usable laptops and new low end netbooks.

so, here are dozen or hundred millions people using their computers, they deserve up to date software as well as you. it's also nice to have your video or music player loading instantly whether you use it on a 500MHz or a 3GHz PC.

of course I have 2GB now due to getting new hardware (and have trouble filling it up) and most often more than 80% is "wasted" but where's the trouble? it cost me so little and it's here to allow me data heavy uses such as high end games (the biggest ram consumers on my PC), toys like NASA Worldwind and VMs, never having to worry about memory at all.

[K.I.L.E.R]

In my argument the usage of resources is coupled with complexity of a software system. I agree that 500MB for an MP3 player is ridiculous (unless somehow justified), however small software that requires all it's data to fit in cache needs to be very small in every way (mainly functionality) to justify that kind of design.

Trying to fit a web browser's data in cache would not be realistic (not saying that it can't be done) because of all the things people do with browsers.

By cache I mean L1->L3 CPU caches, and not memory.

[sunscar]

The problem isn't so much with memory usage as it is with memory leakage. I've had a single window in IE eat over 200MB of memory before crashing entirely - The page was already loaded, but continued to claim more and more memory. Imagine a handfull of them and you've got a real problem on your hands. Memory leakage aside, it's a balancing act - You really should take advantage of memory, but you should do it efficiently (no need for a gigabyte of RAM for Firefox4). It's also a guessing game - While consumer "A" might have access to four gigabytes of memory consumer "b" may only have access to 512MB, or even 256MB. That's a vast disparity, so the best course of action is to do the best you can with the least you can.

[Sonic]

Originally Posted by sunscar

The problem isn't so much with memory usage as it is with memory leakage. I've had a single window in IE eat over 200MB of memory before crashing entirely - The page was already loaded, but continued to claim more and more memory. Imagine a handfull of them and you've got a real problem on your hands. Memory leakage aside, it's a balancing act - You really should take advantage of memory, but you should do it efficiently (no need for a gigabyte of RAM for Firefox4). It's also a guessing game - While consumer "A" might have access to four gigabytes of memory consumer "b" may only have access to 512MB, or even 256MB. That's a vast disparity, so the best course of action is to do the best you can with the least you can.

If somebody only has 256 MB of memory they have no business getting the latest version of programs that require far more memory.

[Richard]

Firstly let me say that it's beneath you to describe the opposing side as "old" or "outdated" in an argument.

Secondly, if you really think about it, the position that software shouldn't take up 4gb RAM (or whatever) is at least as old as the position that says software should be make use of all available resources. Let's stick with the argument itself and not qualify people, shall we?

I'm old enough to remember a time when people with 4 MB of RAM used to throw this argument around too. Like back then, the point isn't that applications should use the resources available but whether the application can benefit from all these resources. Here's an example:

Visual Studio/Office/whatever big program you can think of. Oh, this is a good example because they can use large amounts of memory/whatever. Okay, what about Notepad? Or a clock widget? Or a one-line BATCH file "hello world" program? See where I'm going?

Resource utilisation should be driven by FEATURES and not an arbitrary notion that "Yeah, I have a monster computer NOW, so apps should use it".

I don't think anyone necessarily wants a program that can fit in a floppy and be able to fit into real-mode ram. But if every other competing program with the same feature-set DOES fit into a floppy and DOES use less than 1mb of ram then your brand new application bloody well should too! Everything else is just sloppy programming.

Here's a recent example: The Windows distro of Google Chrome is an 8mb download while Opera is half that. You might argue that nowadays four extra mb of download is nothing and I'll agree but Opera has a gazillion more features than Chrome. Scale this example and that's why you have programs using a lot more ram/cpu/whatever than similar programs with similar feature-sets. Who draws the line between what's acceptable? No one, but once you take that stance that everything is permitted what moral ground will you have to say Notepad should NOT be able to use 4GB of ram and should NOT max out a quad-core when doing Ctrl + F?

[sunscar]

Originally Posted by Sonic

If somebody only has 256 MB of memory they have no business getting the latest version of programs that require far more memory.

They have as much business as anyone else - Nobody should be suffering radically different memory requirements from one revision to the next, it's preposterous. Nobody should be faced with a machine that moves like frozen glue just because they've updated from "Generic antivirus program 2007" to "Generic antivirus program 2008," simply because the designers lack foresight. The assumption to the contrary shows a dread disregard for the consumers they target.