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   Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe (gsuberland@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:33:44 JST Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe

   using a laptop with 16GB of RAM feels like riding the rails and sticking my head out the side to take photos of the utility poles.

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:33:39 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Tóth Gábor Baltazár
     • abadidea

     @0xabad1dea @gsuberland @tthbaltazar the problem you run into is every application applying this logic thus resulting in you immediately running out of ram

     i don't, factually, know if electron does this, but if chrome and electron do this, that seems immediately problematic in today's average pc

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     abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:33:40 JST abadidea

     in reply to

     • Tóth Gábor Baltazár

     @gsuberland @tthbaltazar unfortunately this number is very misleading and hard to divine anything from in this day and age — because if the ram is empty anyway then there’s no reason for the browser not to use huge chunks of it for cache it can throw out later under pressure

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     Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe (gsuberland@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:33:41 JST Graham Sutherland🎃 / Polynomial.pdf.exe

     in reply to

     • Tóth Gábor Baltazár

     @tthbaltazar probably preaching to the choir but it's hilariously bad with win11. was at 85% usage with just one chrome tab open at the "new tab" page

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     Tóth Gábor Baltazár (tthbaltazar@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:33:43 JST Tóth Gábor Baltazár

     in reply to

     @gsuberland
     😭

     I never had more than 16

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:34:13 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Tóth Gábor Baltazár
     • abadidea

     @0xabad1dea @gsuberland @tthbaltazar i know good applications have back-off algorithms for "i'm going to speculatively grab this memory to use as cache", but it's a notoriously hard problem to solve well! i don't think we (as a field) have any solution that works well

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     Josh Simmons (dotstdy@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:37:47 JST Josh Simmons

     in reply to

     • Tóth Gábor Baltazár
     • abadidea
     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @0xabad1dea @gsuberland @tthbaltazar Honestly I'm not sure it's common that applications speculatively fill up memory as cache. It's true mostly just for things like games which dynamically adjust their texture budget for GPU memory, but even there lots of them just splat out whatever they require and hope vidmm keeps their shit resident when they're in the foreground. cpu side applications seem even less sophisticated in general, but still end up relying on OS paging.

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:40:36 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Tóth Gábor Baltazár
     • abadidea
     • Josh Simmons

     @dotstdy @0xabad1dea @gsuberland @tthbaltazar i'm moderately confident that chrome, specifically, does do that, but i haven't personally checked the sources to understand where and how much

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     Josh Simmons (dotstdy@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 16:46:39 JST Josh Simmons

     in reply to

     • Tóth Gábor Baltazár
     • abadidea
     • ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     @whitequark @0xabad1dea @gsuberland @tthbaltazar another thing which does behave that way in practice is GC and systems built around GC shaped data-structures. e.g. if you trigger an emergency collection on oom or low memory. which, exactly like you say, doesn't work so good when you have multiple instances. (classic 'language server' issue there, manually pressing the force GC button in resharper to salvage memory...)