I have 64GB of RAM and between IDE, some Docker containers and a local LLM, that started feeling like too little already. It’s just never enough, we always find creative ways to use every byte that’s available.
Oh and the browser (any browser, I tried many) just takes up 1GB per tab it seems. It’s insane. My old 8GB laptop is nearly unusable now and can barely be used to browse the internet and very little else. I can at least keep coding on emacs. Who would think emacs would one day be an example of a lean app!?
Define “scarce.” A pair of 16GB modules (32GB total) is around $100.
You can buy an entire complete mini PC including 16GB of modular RAM for $240 on AliExpress.
I’m not saying “don’t optimize.” I’m saying that watching your task manager, seeing a big number and freaking out isn’t really the definition of unacceptable performance.
> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”
> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
Some of that memory isn't going to be touched again, and will eventually be moved to swap, but it still pushed things out of RAM to be there and is a troublemaker.
The rest of that memory will be needed again, so if it gets swapped out it'll lag badly when you switch back to the program.
Either way 99% of programs are not doing any kind of intelligent use of spare memory. If you see them doing something that looks wasteful, that's because they're being wasteful.
The one thing to remember is that at the OS level, disk cache pretty much qualifies as free memory. But that's unrelated to this issue.
"RAM is not really something you explicitly ration."
It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation at all. That’s like saying “oh well we landed on the moon with a turd burger of a computer so that means I shouldn’t need more than 8kb of memory!”
Okay but I’m not trying to land on the moon, I’m trying to have an HD group video call and maybe play Cyberpunk in 4K later.
Let me ask you, how much did that 8MB of RAM cost you back in the day? I bet it was more than the $100 it costs to get 32GB of RAM or the $200 it costs to get 64GB. Before you apply inflation!
it sent text messages, and received them. Ok now I can send some pictures and audio clips. I would understand a 10x increase, but not literal gigabytes.
I have more memory so i can do more things, not so I can do the same things only slightly slower than I could before.
> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”
Except when something really does need more RAM, and fails. LLVM for example having, somehow, become a bit chonky and now fails to compile on 32-bit OpenBSD systems because it wants more memory than is available. Less bloated software of course does not suffer from this problem, and continues to run on still functional 32-bit systems.
> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
Xorg is using 92M, irssi 21M (bloated, but I've been lazy about finding something leaner), xenodm 12M. That's the top three. Oh, Windows? Yeah. About that. Best you can hope for is not to catch too much of the splatter. (What passes for Mac OS X these days also seems fairly dismal.)
> RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
Paperclips were hung on the rack doors to make it easier to poke the wee little red reset button when some poorly written software went all gibblesquik (as poorly written software is wont to do) and the OOM killer could not cope and, whelp, reset time. Elsewhere, RAM is explicitly rationed—perhaps certain aspects of timesharing have been somewhat forgotten in this benighted era of bloat?—and malloc will return NULL, something certain programmers often fail to check for, which is generally followed by the kernel taking the error-ridden code out back and shooting it.
Before reminding everyone of a theory, did you check where that theory applies in this discussion of an app in practice?
Also, even in theory the issue isn't only with "wouldn't function", but "would function slower due to eg disk swaps / cause other apps to function slower".
He did, via the task manager. You're the one saying high RAM utilization doesn't matter because 'wrong reasons in theory and in practice', so it's on you to check and confirm it so that you could be correct at least in practice in this specific case
Oh, man, how can you be wrong about everything? Here is the author noticing performance issues, he's even in a "but in theory it doesn't have to be slow" camp that's closer to yours:
> An app can use a lot of memory, and it does not necessarily mean it’s a performance nightmare, but the issue with the new WhatsApp is that it feels sluggish. You’re going to notice sluggish performance, long loading time, and other performance issues when browsing different conversations.
I also use it a lot but the app has always been terrible. I forget exactly what the problems are but I think the text input becomes unresponsive and it becomes unusable.
Honestly I think you're mostly correct. The amount of people using WhatsApp on the desktop is probably rather limited, certainly in the scope of WhatsApp usage in general. Memory, while I feel that a gigabyte is way to much for what is essentially a chat app, it is virtual memory, so it's not as problematic as I'd like it to be.
The issue, I think, is who the desktop users are. They sales people, they are people who conduct business over WhatsApp. The buyers at a previous job uses whatever the sellers in Asia, eastern Europe and the middle east are using. A long time ago, that was mostly Skype, now it WhatsApp. There a huge benefit to having WhatsApp on your desktop, with easy copy/paste, Excel and everything you need to make the deals.
Maybe Meta doesn't believe you should do business over WhatsApp and don't wont to cater to that crowed.
I would love to see what a professional Windows application developer, if those are still around, could do with a native WhatsApp client. Using modern C++, or just C# and all the tooling provided by the platform, how small and functional could you actually make something like that.
I agree about this potential of most WhatsApp users residing in markets with less powerful median hardware.
Still, I think the experience reported is very similar to running Chrome, and I think any laptop with 8GB of RAM can handle the application plus Excel and a web browser (or just run WhatsApp in the browser) just fine.
A complete mini PC with 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, and a relatively modern processor goes for like $240 on AliExpress. And that’s before you consider used hardware.
It would be interesting in knowing how many feel like I do. Running an application in a browser window or tab is measure of last resort. People already have tens of tabs, if not hundreds, and multiple browser windows open, stuffing an application into one for those are terrible for the user experience. That's a worse solution than a web wrapper.
It's much easier to locate an application that has it's own process and presence in the operating system.
The keyword you missed is 'idle'. An app should use as much Ram as needed to cache computation and network as it runs. But it shouldn't do when in the background. The Ram used here is not for accelerating the user experience. It's for the internal functioning of the managed language (Javascript) and virtual machine (Dom and browser API) because it has been packaged as a full Chrome clone running a single web app.
Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now.
Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”
Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.