6 ms·

I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here. Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab... And if "ea

I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here. Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
pdhborges 3mo ago
How come I have never seen this tradeoff work in practice?
- t-writescode 3mo ago
  You see it all the time in Slack, Discord and so on. Isn’t VS Code an Electron app? Or just its predecessor?
  - LtWorf 3mo ago
    But… everyone thinks those are awful as well
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
ruszki 3mo ago
There are 100s of processes running on my Windows without starting anything explicitly. They are using more than 10 gb of RAM. I am already feeling the consequences of this sloppiness. Especially that my IDE/compiler/emulator easily use 20+ GB. My 32 GB of memory is not enough somehow…
- knollimar 3mo ago
  Whats wrong with 100MB*100?
  - ruszki 3mo ago
    It’s funny, because I don’t expect more features from Windows than Windows XP, or let’s pretend that I need more security (I don’t, but I know a lot of folks need them), then Windows 7. But even those could have been reduced greatly. I remember that I could disable at least half of the services in XP without losing anything. Maybe the only features since back then which I use are proper DPI scaling, individual app sound level settings, and maybe the favorite folders in Explorer, but I’m not sure whether this later one didn’t exist back then. If they would provide that (with security patches of course), then they wouldn’t need “quick startup” and other bullshits to make things “quicker”.
- qmr 3mo ago
  Why would you use such a system?
  - ruszki 3mo ago
    Because no matter what a lot of people say here: you still need to be lucky to have a fully functioning system on Linux without continuous roadblocks everywhere. And I’m saying this after using Linux for more than a quarter of a century, occasionally as my main OS. I switched from it back just a few months ago, after I gave up to figure out how to have more uptime on battery for half a year, how to make my monitors with widely different DPIs work properly (literally without crashing the whole system), how to simply play a video reliably, and these just after solving a bunch of different issues already. And my lifestyle really doesn’t allow that battery drain issue at all.
- Gibbon1 3mo ago
  I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building. The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that. Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.
  - LtWorf 3mo ago
    Not even microsoft can sink microsoft.
  - elashri 3mo ago
    > webshitten Thanks for this term, I vote for it to be the technical term of the last decade.
- anigbrowl 3mo ago
  I feel you - the most annoying thing about this sort of bloat is just not being able to keep up with or identify everything that's running. Don't get me wrong, this can be a problem on MacOS or Linux, but it feels much more manageable in a *nix environment even though I grew up with DOS/windows.
sgarland 3mo ago
IME, there is a negative correlation “justifies increased memory consumption by citing DX” and “ships code with fewer critical issues.”
SupLockDef 3mo ago
There is no nuance in 400%...
- srdjanr 3mo ago
  Of course there is. If it increased from 1MB to 4MB, that would definitely be insignificant
  - fuzzfactor 3mo ago
    That's how it started though, it's a slippery slope :\
    - rustcleaner 3mo ago
      Maybe a sales tax scaling with code size, memory use, and processor time for commercial software - a scale based on a 'model' computer that costs 3% of the median American's income - would disincentivise the shift to web languages, which has been happening because investors want to squeeze developers down to burger flipper pay levels. Software made in 2005-2015 is no less capable than that today, except the lack of cloud cancer and AI gimmickry. "Downgrading" to those is actually a real upgrade today!
      - fuzzfactor 3mo ago
        That would actually be like taxing or regulating the code itself, which could be pretty straightforward in proportion to its size and resource wastage. I just think taxes have proven to be highly nonideal unless they are levied against some added-value being realized, but you're giving me ideas. You could perhaps partially tax based on value too, but it could start to get confusing and unfair again. Either way, taxes would probably turn out to be more of a parasite in terms of how it can overwhelm the value added if levies rise far beyond relative insignificance. Regardless of what good might come of it on the surface looking at the code. The code itself is already regulated anyway, I would rather see a minor adjustment to the regulation where only code in an open-standard low-level language can be copyrighted. You wouldn't even need to add enough taxes for negative incentive if the higher-level stuff was set free, that would unleash incredible resources. That might be one of the most effective ways to reverse the exponential increase in resource-hogging, with greatest urgency. Couldn't do it overnight, probably have to roll it back against a timeline, one layer at a time. Simulate the reversal of the metastization as logically as can be done from this point. There's just no way we should have ever needed more than 100mb of C: drive space as long as you wanted to run your office with no further features than Windows 95 with Office 97. To be generous another 100mb for multimedia and another 100 for internet, plus the OS and Microsoft apps are supposed to get more efficient from there since they were rushed to market in the '90's themselves. Gigabytes were supposed to be for storage and media files, and there was never supposed to be any latency of any kind as soon as processors got up to 1GHz and you got off dial-up. Mice with balls were all that was necessary too, and that was with IDE HDDs. All you can do is weep for what could have been.
nokeya 3mo ago
The problem is that it does not. At all.
lynndotpy 3mo ago
It does not matter how well or poorly Chrome mismanages memory, 400MB is still 400MB. If that 400MB is 10% of the free RAM after the share the OS takes, then that is a hefty toll. And the regular updates Windows 11 users are getting are famously not providing value, but taking value away. Case in point right here is the new media player.
- ffsm8 3mo ago
  People try to use Windows 11 with 4GB of RAM? I doubt that's viable, honestly... At that point, just don't use microslop software
  - rustcleaner 3mo ago
    Windows Server 2022 comes up just fine in 4-8GB RAM disposable qubes. I can easily load Adobe MCCS6 applications in that. I can run Mathematica in that. I can load Siemens NX 10-12 in that and do basic modeling! #StopTheBloat #StopTheOffshoring
    - Peanuts99 3mo ago
      I have a few Azure VMS running server 2022 with 2GB running as a controller. Works surprisingly well.
      - ffsm8 3mo ago
        And you're running windows media player on these? I doubt that, so entirely unrelated to the fact that windows 11 does not, which is the OS the vibecoded slop media player is gonna be used on. > This new software replaces Groove Music and the classic Windows Media Player across all Windows 11 PCs.
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    Windows 10 was viable with 4 GB, assuming you restricted yourself. Nowadays it mostly isn't, precisely because of things like this.
  - 3mo ago
StilesCrisis 3mo ago
A single Chrome tab does not use gigabytes. In fact, this app IS a Chrome tab! It's web based, so it's using Edge, which is just Chrome in a trenchcoat.
- tentacleuno 3mo ago
  Isn't Edge slightly more efficient than Chrome on Windows? Maybe it's changed, but that's always been what everyone has said.
  - StilesCrisis 3mo ago
    Only in that they change the default settings to sleep tabs more aggressively. It's the same codebase.
sombragris 3mo ago
No, no and no. Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit. Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.
- reenorap 3mo ago
  From CS101 it’s called virtual memory. Things get swapped in and out of memory when they need to. An extra 200MB of memory when Chrome takes gigabytes of memory is a petty thing to complain about. How much do you want to bet you don’t even use windows media player? It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.
  - sgarland 3mo ago
    > VLC VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP. More directly, do you not find it odd and embarrassing for a tech giant to be unable to beat a bunch of volunteers? I mean, ffmpeg famously hand-writes a lot of assembly, but it turns out Microsoft could absolutely do that as well if they really wanted to. They could produce performant, native apps; they just choose not to.
    - aleph_minus_one 3mo ago
      > VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP. Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.
    - techteach00 3mo ago
      The older I get the more volunteer software projects I donate to. VLC being one of them.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

pdhborges 3mo ago

How come I have never seen this tradeoff work in practice?

t-writescode 3mo ago
You see it all the time in Slack, Discord and so on. Isn’t VS Code an Electron app? Or just its predecessor?
- LtWorf 3mo ago
  But… everyone thinks those are awful as well

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

ruszki 3mo ago

There are 100s of processes running on my Windows without starting anything explicitly. They are using more than 10 gb of RAM. I am already feeling the consequences of this sloppiness. Especially that my IDE/compiler/emulator easily use 20+ GB. My 32 GB of memory is not enough somehow…

knollimar 3mo ago
Whats wrong with 100MB*100?
- ruszki 3mo ago
  It’s funny, because I don’t expect more features from Windows than Windows XP, or let’s pretend that I need more security (I don’t, but I know a lot of folks need them), then Windows 7. But even those could have been reduced greatly. I remember that I could disable at least half of the services in XP without losing anything. Maybe the only features since back then which I use are proper DPI scaling, individual app sound level settings, and maybe the favorite folders in Explorer, but I’m not sure whether this later one didn’t exist back then. If they would provide that (with security patches of course), then they wouldn’t need “quick startup” and other bullshits to make things “quicker”.
qmr 3mo ago
Why would you use such a system?
- ruszki 3mo ago
  Because no matter what a lot of people say here: you still need to be lucky to have a fully functioning system on Linux without continuous roadblocks everywhere. And I’m saying this after using Linux for more than a quarter of a century, occasionally as my main OS. I switched from it back just a few months ago, after I gave up to figure out how to have more uptime on battery for half a year, how to make my monitors with widely different DPIs work properly (literally without crashing the whole system), how to simply play a video reliably, and these just after solving a bunch of different issues already. And my lifestyle really doesn’t allow that battery drain issue at all.
Gibbon1 3mo ago
I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building. The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that. Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.
- LtWorf 3mo ago
  Not even microsoft can sink microsoft.
- elashri 3mo ago
  > webshitten Thanks for this term, I vote for it to be the technical term of the last decade.
anigbrowl 3mo ago
I feel you - the most annoying thing about this sort of bloat is just not being able to keep up with or identify everything that's running. Don't get me wrong, this can be a problem on MacOS or Linux, but it feels much more manageable in a *nix environment even though I grew up with DOS/windows.

sgarland 3mo ago

IME, there is a negative correlation “justifies increased memory consumption by citing DX” and “ships code with fewer critical issues.”

SupLockDef 3mo ago

There is no nuance in 400%...

srdjanr 3mo ago
Of course there is. If it increased from 1MB to 4MB, that would definitely be insignificant
- fuzzfactor 3mo ago
  That's how it started though, it's a slippery slope :\
  - rustcleaner 3mo ago
    Maybe a sales tax scaling with code size, memory use, and processor time for commercial software - a scale based on a 'model' computer that costs 3% of the median American's income - would disincentivise the shift to web languages, which has been happening because investors want to squeeze developers down to burger flipper pay levels. Software made in 2005-2015 is no less capable than that today, except the lack of cloud cancer and AI gimmickry. "Downgrading" to those is actually a real upgrade today!
    - fuzzfactor 3mo ago
      That would actually be like taxing or regulating the code itself, which could be pretty straightforward in proportion to its size and resource wastage. I just think taxes have proven to be highly nonideal unless they are levied against some added-value being realized, but you're giving me ideas. You could perhaps partially tax based on value too, but it could start to get confusing and unfair again. Either way, taxes would probably turn out to be more of a parasite in terms of how it can overwhelm the value added if levies rise far beyond relative insignificance. Regardless of what good might come of it on the surface looking at the code. The code itself is already regulated anyway, I would rather see a minor adjustment to the regulation where only code in an open-standard low-level language can be copyrighted. You wouldn't even need to add enough taxes for negative incentive if the higher-level stuff was set free, that would unleash incredible resources. That might be one of the most effective ways to reverse the exponential increase in resource-hogging, with greatest urgency. Couldn't do it overnight, probably have to roll it back against a timeline, one layer at a time. Simulate the reversal of the metastization as logically as can be done from this point. There's just no way we should have ever needed more than 100mb of C: drive space as long as you wanted to run your office with no further features than Windows 95 with Office 97. To be generous another 100mb for multimedia and another 100 for internet, plus the OS and Microsoft apps are supposed to get more efficient from there since they were rushed to market in the '90's themselves. Gigabytes were supposed to be for storage and media files, and there was never supposed to be any latency of any kind as soon as processors got up to 1GHz and you got off dial-up. Mice with balls were all that was necessary too, and that was with IDE HDDs. All you can do is weep for what could have been.

nokeya 3mo ago

The problem is that it does not. At all.

lynndotpy 3mo ago

It does not matter how well or poorly Chrome mismanages memory, 400MB is still 400MB. If that 400MB is 10% of the free RAM after the share the OS takes, then that is a hefty toll. And the regular updates Windows 11 users are getting are famously not providing value, but taking value away. Case in point right here is the new media player.

ffsm8 3mo ago
People try to use Windows 11 with 4GB of RAM? I doubt that's viable, honestly... At that point, just don't use microslop software
- rustcleaner 3mo ago
  Windows Server 2022 comes up just fine in 4-8GB RAM disposable qubes. I can easily load Adobe MCCS6 applications in that. I can run Mathematica in that. I can load Siemens NX 10-12 in that and do basic modeling! #StopTheBloat #StopTheOffshoring
  - Peanuts99 3mo ago
    I have a few Azure VMS running server 2022 with 2GB running as a controller. Works surprisingly well.
    - ffsm8 3mo ago
      And you're running windows media player on these? I doubt that, so entirely unrelated to the fact that windows 11 does not, which is the OS the vibecoded slop media player is gonna be used on. > This new software replaces Groove Music and the classic Windows Media Player across all Windows 11 PCs.
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  Windows 10 was viable with 4 GB, assuming you restricted yourself. Nowadays it mostly isn't, precisely because of things like this.
- 3mo ago

StilesCrisis 3mo ago

A single Chrome tab does not use gigabytes. In fact, this app IS a Chrome tab! It's web based, so it's using Edge, which is just Chrome in a trenchcoat.

tentacleuno 3mo ago
Isn't Edge slightly more efficient than Chrome on Windows? Maybe it's changed, but that's always been what everyone has said.
- StilesCrisis 3mo ago
  Only in that they change the default settings to sleep tabs more aggressively. It's the same codebase.

sombragris 3mo ago

No, no and no. Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit. Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.

reenorap 3mo ago
From CS101 it’s called virtual memory. Things get swapped in and out of memory when they need to. An extra 200MB of memory when Chrome takes gigabytes of memory is a petty thing to complain about. How much do you want to bet you don’t even use windows media player? It’s fake outrage and if you care that much use VLC.
- sgarland 3mo ago
  > VLC VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP. More directly, do you not find it odd and embarrassing for a tech giant to be unable to beat a bunch of volunteers? I mean, ffmpeg famously hand-writes a lot of assembly, but it turns out Microsoft could absolutely do that as well if they really wanted to. They could produce performant, native apps; they just choose not to.
  - aleph_minus_one 3mo ago
    > VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP. Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.
  - techteach00 3mo ago
    The older I get the more volunteer software projects I donate to. VLC being one of them.