Do as we say not as we do

32? It takes a lot to not only use 16, but to actively use it and be affected by slower pagefile access.

What? FF with a bunch of Jira tabs, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Miro, Spotify, and I am at 100% of 16 gigs. Not even saying anything about running a 8gig VM from time to time

8GB wouldn't get me through a cold boot and the stack of corporate mandated spyware security agents.

Teams, Firefox, and Outlook and that’s most of my Windows work PC RAM gone. Have to close out of my dev work whenever a meeting is afoot because the calls fucking hammer this thing.

Ehh, my main machine eats up 12-16GB with just background tasks, and that's on W10. Nobody gives a fuck about optimization since the late 00s.

E: just woke up my system

Ram usage isn’t important, it’s how much your page being hit. Otherwise you want your ram fully utilized.

How much is your page being used? That’s a more real indicator. You should want all of your ram to be used.

Damn bro, that's brutal.

Well, I'm installing Linux (CachyOS) on my former W10 PC this weekend. So, my 16gb of ram will be well utilized.

At least someone still cares about optimization.

And CachyOS running KDE Plasma is the most RAM hungry setup. I took a Win 11 laptop with 8gb and threw Debian running Xfce and that's using like 300mb of RAM lol

Fuck Nvidia. Fuck SamA with a rusty chainsaw.

Just ship them with windows XP or windows 7 if you only have 8GB RAM...

Am I crazy or is this one of the very tiny kinda shitty silver lining to all of this? Software developers are being forced to optimize their shit?

They're not actually gonna optimize anything

Teams is the most performance inefficient shit I've ever been forced to use.

We use both Zoom and Teams for meeting with partners. On my piece of shit work laptop, I have no problem with Zoom. Teams on the other hand will randomly cut my audio, lag my cursor, or cause peripherals to stop working when I'm in a meeting. I simply can't fathom how it's as bad as it is.

You would think this would encourage better optimized software, but I doubt devs will actually do that. Most modern code practices are about ensuring that code is more easily maintained, often at the cost of performance. Breaking "clean code" rules can easily make programs run 10-25x faster, but will be much harder to maintain.

We also seeing a lot of vibe coding now, which mixes clean code practices (which are well documents online) with messier, less well planned code.

I guess going from 7-8 to 600-1.2k seemed like such an improvement I didn't think to GO HARDER to 300. Though my Ubuntu server VMs get that I assume lol.

SysMain / Superfetch has altered your perception of how much RAM you actually use.

That's because Teams is a piece of shit, not because 16GB isn't enough normally.

The number of people that still don't understand this, even after it's been discussed ad nauseum for decades is frightening.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. You want it used. You want cached data there for instant access. What matters is how much is available for something else if you need it, and Windows does a shit job of getting that info across.

I haven't heard of that since the Vista days, totally forgot about it. Doesn't make sense, I've been all-flash* (E is still HDD for backups, no programs) for well-over a decade. Maybe I should disable it and see if it makes a difference. C is a Samsung 960 Pro and D is a Western Digital Black SN750 in raid0, so it's not really helping even if it is doing something...

My Linux system (which used to run Window so it has 32 GB of RAM), won't even hit 8 GB if I'm not gaming. I've opened up multiple apps just to show how efficient it is. I think it was sitting around 4 GB before I started running things to see if I can make it balloon easily.

And I'm running most my apps as flatpaks which I've heard may add some slight overhead in terms of RAM usage - someone correct me if I'm wrong about this.

My work computer (granted it likely has tons of background security tools running) uses 10/16 GB's just to get to the desktop and do nothing. The best part is, because ~1.2 GB's of RAM gets allocated for the integrated graphics, I'm really only left with ~4.8 GB's of RAM to do actual work. But wait, it gets even better! This week I found out some bullshit Copilot feature was enabled and taking up another ~1.2 GB's of RAM, leaving me with a total of 3.6 GB's of RAM. So I disabled the WSAIFabricSvc service and reclaimed a sliver of dignity and work space.

What's forcing them? Do we have alternatives?

No. No I can play games on Linux without capping my 16.

Edit: yes I checked page file use, dip-ass. Not counting GPU ram.

I'm pretty sure I have the pagefile disabled; both C and D are NVMe drives, and D is raid0. I disabled superfetch a few minutes ago, rebooted, and don't see any performance impact, but the used memory when idle is now 10GB, vs the 19 in that screenshot. No other changes.

I could see the appeal if I was using a platter drive for my programs or frequent data, but it's not 2008 anymore. I'd rather see actual usage over 'the computer knows best'.

E: me spell good

The alternative is your CPU spooling up and a longer delay launching applications.

In your screenshot, you already have 70% available memory. Are you on a quest to maximize idle ram? If so, why?

This thread is full of misconceptions about RAM use. It is normal and efficient for an OS to reserve memory for processes even if it not really used. This memory will be juggled around in case that is needed. It would be very bad for a modern OS if you somehow lowered your used RAM to near 0%. That would make the computer slower.

See for example this:
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

The same thing goes for Windows. It reserves RAM to be used. Like it should be.

Sure, Windows is bloated.

But posting screenshots of your task manager tells us nothing. If it uses 30% of your RAM at start time, that's fine. Or not. Can't really tell.

You shouldn’t disable page.

Also, Christ, how many apps do you have running in your tray?

They wont though. They will press on as usual, and hope Nvidias (and others) dreams of cloudbased subscription computers somehow becomes reality.

In order for left to right:

• AMD software updater
• HASS.Agent
• Sophos Home
• Synology Drive
• Wireguard
• spacedesk
• Haven (discord replacement)
• Vesktop (alternative discord frontend)
• AMD software
• Creative Sound Blaster Command
• Signal
• Rainmeter
• Telegram
• Bitwarden
• Logitech G Hub
• Playnite
• Steam
• Trucky
• ShareX
• KDE Connect
• f.lux
• Wallpaper Engine
• NextDNS
• Windows Security

Steam is far and away the biggest resource hog at 450MB, I'm assuming mostly from the browser engine.

I don't anticipate needing all 64 gigs at once, and afaik the only other reason is for bsod diagnostics. Unless there is something I am unaware of...?

Hibernate?

What is this, 2012?

Shortly after I took the screenshot I fired up Motor Town for a couple hours; when I closed it, the usage settled on 27GB. Like, sure, I have oodles of ram, but why. What does windows anticipate me doing, launching the game multiple times in rapid succession? The game is only like 3GB if I remember right, wtf is it doing that is using 19 + 8 additional gigs on? It's like this black box that's all 'trust me bro' but there's no logic to it. Opaque is the term I want, I believe.

It's been bugging me for a while, just sort of venting. Especially at a restart, I haven't launched anything beyond startup programs. Why is it trying to guess what I might do? If I launch something, close it, sure, keep it in ram for a couple minutes. But don't hold onto it like a hoarder, lol.

Not on this machine, though I use it for one of my laptops. But that system also has the pagefile disabled if I remember correctly, as it has 48 gigs.

(that unit has a buggy gpu that fails to resume from sleep and just gives static instead; windows and linux. So hibernate is the solution for 'sleeping'.)

Flatpaks bring all their own libraries with them rather than using the system ones.

• (plus) you avoid dependency hell, apps "just work"
• (minus) centralised version updates are less effective for bug and security fixes; all flatpaks must be updated separately
• (minus) all flatpak apps take additional disk space since they bring everything with them
• (minus) all flatpak apps take additional memory; Linux can't keep a single copy of a library read-only in memory if multiple apps are using it

I think they have their place for apps that are under very heavy development, or for apps which are extremely "resource heavy" in comparison to the system resources that they use (by which I mean, games). I wouldn't want my bread-and-butter system utilities to be flatpaks.

That's grossly over simplifying the problem. "Clean code" is also not a formally defined concept, which could include anything and everything.

I've had more performance problems due to hacky workarounds, themselves necessary because of lack of foresight during development, rather than a slow abstraction (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen the latter)

16gb will go far on MacOS and any Linux distro you throw at it. Windows 11 will struggle.

The amount of available RAM (which includes RAM actively used for caches but which will be immediately reassigned by the OS if requested by applications) matters more if you do a lot of task switching.

When it's being used, stuff gets slower - so yes, I technically use it as an indicator, by noticing that my machine is slow because it's out of free ram

Which is still insane, given that 10 wanted 1 or 2. We haven’t seen a jump like this since XP to Vista.

Modern OS that isn't Windows though can use significantly less RAM. It's all the telemetry shit and always-online shit thats been jammed into the OS that makes it run poorly. Theres no reason to run CoPilot in File Explorer.

Windows 11 is bloated enough that people using local AI avoid it like the plague. These aren't dumb, non-technical people. They're the opposite of that. They all use Linux or maybe Windows 10 (still updated and you can use IoT which goes to 2032). A near-frontier quality AI told me using IoT would free up about 1-2gb of ram compared to Windows 11.

or notepad...

Indie developers, like the 1-5 staff game studios on Steam, never stopped doing so. You can run most indie games on an old PC today. The big AAA game companies like Activision are taking a big gamble on the next generation, which they insist you'll need a newer console or PC to run. Bethesda tried that with Starfield and it didn't work out so well. The game's not as terrible as people say, but its kind of in the middle of the pack of AAA gaming RPGs and it demanded a fairly large amount of VRAM to run well. I predict things will not go well for games like Modern Warfare 4 that won't run on the last gen consoles or PCs.
If developers aren't aiming at older devices then they're making a niche product not a mass market product

You know what doesnt need 32gb? Linux.

i havent used computer with less than 32Gb in a decade

Discord, spotify, Firefox and minecraft (with Mods) is enough to bring down my 16 gbs