Thread

1. zsoltkacsandi · 1790860272 · focus · HN ↗

   No one will use AI products if there won't be consumer products because of RAM shortage.

   1. pickleglitch · 1790860529 · focus · HN ↗

      The plan is to make us all use shitty hardware like a chromebook and rent compute from the cloud for anything heavier than a web browser.

      1. cube00 · 1790861267 · focus · HN ↗

         > anything heavier than a web browser

         The way Chrome feasts on RAM, might need the cloud for that too.

         1. KellyCriterion · 1790862087 · focus · HN ↗

            Honestly, FF became similar worse: On my 16 GB machine, when surfing some hours FF has allocated around 10-11 GB and for whatever reason it does not free them, unless I exit and restart it

            1. Gareth321 · 1790864515 · focus · HN ↗

               Perhaps we should blame this on shitty website design. So many of them load huge assets for no good reason. They get away with it because modern processors are that good, bandwidth is cheap, and until now, RAM has also been cheap.
            2. StillBored · 1790865701 · focus · HN ↗

               On linux do something like `systemd-run --user --scope -p MemoryHigh=XG -p MemoryMax=X+2G firefox` to constrain it since the firefox people refuse to implement the memory limits logic that say Edge has..

               But at the same time, this isn't just a Firefox issue, although they may be worse than most. Its a fundamental tenant of GC languages. You trade CPU (for the garbage collection) for RAM utilization. IIRC This was apparent by the late 70s with Dijkstra, but very clearly indicated in say Hertz where they are explicitly scaling GC overhead vs memory footprint to find that it takes ~5x the ram to approach the efficiency of an explicit allocate/deallocate model. Lower footprints are achievable but the GC overhead goes way up just to reach 2x the ram footprint such that the GC tends to dominate the CPU utilization.

               And there are lots of papers like this for long running processes. GC works well if your model is basically allocate as much as you like, exit the process before actually needing to do a proper GC pass. Especially for contended systems where the memory is returned to the OS. This is why say PHP tended not to have this problem, because the memory was largely freed at the end of every request.

            3. undersuit · 1790868764 · focus · HN ↗

               The New Tab Suspender plugin has my 50+ Firefox tabs at 2.2GB of ram usage right now. Having every tab ready and waiting for you is of course going to have increased memory usage.
            4. KellyCriterion · 1790875926 · focus · HN ↗

               I do not get why this gets so many downvotes:

               - the described behaviour is the one I experience on my Win10 notebook (Lenovo X1)

               - Firefox wasnt always that, thats what Im refering to

               - I can see in ProcessExplorer how many threads it starts & keeps, and for whatever reason this is always a lot, even if I open only 1 tab after coming from new start

            5. bobsmooth · 1790887401 · focus · HN ↗

               Same. I have to restart FF once it reaches the 10GB mark.
            6. kalleboo · 1790911336 · focus · HN ↗

               Even Safari is gobbling up RAM these days, I think it's just all the JavaScript code on the web is pure garbage, and what was bad enough before is getting even worse with all the vibeslop coding going on now.

               Garbage collected languages and seemingly unlimited virtual memory encourage developers to not even think about memory allocation any more, so memory usage for a tab that's left open just grows and grows.

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