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I like memory hungry desktop applications.

I do not like sluggish desktop applications.

Allow me to explain (although, this may already be obvious to quite a few of you)

Memory usage is stigmatized quite a lot today, and for good reason. Not only is it an indication of poor optimization, but not too many years ago, memory was a much more scarce resource.

And something that started as a joke in that era is true in this era: free memory is wasted memory. You may argue, correctly, that free memory is not wasted; it is reserved for future potential tasks. However, if you have 16GB of free memory and don't have any plans to begin rendering a 3D animation anytime soon, that memory is wasted.

Linux understands this. Linux actually has three States for memory to be in: used, free, and available. Used and free memory are the usual. However, Linux automatically caches files that you use and places them in ram as "available" memory. Available memory can be used at any time by programs, simply dumping out whatever was previously occupying the memory.

And as you well know, ram is much faster than even an SSD. Programs which are memory heavy COULD (< important) be holding things in memory rather than having them sit on the HDD, waiting to be slowly retrieved. I much rather a web browser take up 4 GB of RAM than sit around waiting for it to read the caches image off my had drive.

Now, allow me to reiterate: unoptimized programs still piss me off. There's no need for that electron-based webcam image capture app to take three gigs of memory upon launch. But I love it when programs use the hardware I spent money on to run smoother.

Don't hate a program simply because it's at the top of task manager.

Comments
  • 6
  • 13
    But but but chrome....ram.. reeeee

    Half of dR is punching the air right now lol
  • 3
    I love maxing server resources with my jobs, they finish faster than my coworkers who throttle work with bad code.
  • 7
    Allow me rephrase that.

    Heavily caching and properly maintaining that cache apps == good

    apps that load all the dependencies into the memory, while they only need like 5% of all that loaded code == bad

    heavily caching and properly maintaining that cache, allowing OS to drop some parts of that cache on-demand apps are the best.
  • 0
    Tell that to my Spark application that runs out of memory and spills to disk until the clusters disk fills up and crashes.

    This is still happening after optimisation and deleting data until before the crash first happened.
  • 1
    That's great, but I have 4GB ram, and I'm good with configs of any kind. So in my case:
    app that allows configuring cache behavior == good
    App that doesn't cache == okay
    App that caches even just a few hundred megabytes without me having a word in it == unacceptable
    And I'm not an exception. Many people have 4 gigabytes. It's up to the industry to support at least the average low hardware.
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