Damn electron and the likes

I wonder what the hell they are doing with it? I mean I have the 3B with IIRC 1GB and I can use the desktop and run python scripts to fiddle with all the I/O ports and stuff, what do you do with a raspberry that needs eight times the RAM??

I'm seriously curious!

About 6 months ago I upgraded my desktop from 16 to 48 gigs cause there were a few times I felt like I needed a bigger tmpfs.
Anyway, the other day I set up a simulation of this cluster I'm configuring, just kept piling up virtual machines without looking cause I knew I had all the ram I could need for them. Eventually I got curious and checked my usage, I had just only reached 16 gigs.

I think basically the only time I use more that the 16 gigs I had is when I fire up my GPU passthrough windows VM that I use for games, which isn't your typical usage.

I have a browser tab addiction problem, and I often run both LibreWolf and Firefox at the same time (reasons). I run discord all the time, signal, have a VTT going on, a game, YouTube playing… and I look at my RAM usage and wonder why did I buy so much when I can never reach 16 GB.

While I agree electron apps suck and I avoid them… Whatever you guys are running ain’t a typical use case.

Even on windows, its hilarious to compare the RAM Discord uses. I caught the native app doing 2+gb, and Firefox beating it by... 100mb? I didnt compare ram usage too hard on my Stram Deck though between Flatpak and Firefox, but I expect firefox to be a bit better with its addons/plugins, like it was on windows

That doesn't mean anything. If you have tons of free RAM, programs tend to use more than strictly necessary because it speeds things up. That doesn't mean they won't run perfectly fine with 8GiB as well.

What distro are you using? What apps are open?

It used to be that 640K oughta be enough for anyone.

ESP32 microcontrollers can do Bluetooth and WiFi with less than 4.

You don't comprehend just how easy it is to do GUI programming in Javascript. Like if C++ is a nunchuck and Bash is a cursed hammer and lisp is a shiv then when it comes to GUI programming Javascript is Vector's control panel from dispicable me.

I have developed personalized tools as part of my job and I chose qt to write them in partially because if a company I work for would ever try to commercialize them, they'd have to either buy qt licenses or open source them.

I cheat a bit though because I use qt through python.

I will also never understand how JavaScript development has gotten so complicated with seemingly zero benefits. It takes minutes to do a "frontend build" and the output grows larger all of the time. I bumped into some Angular crap that was hundreds of megabytes somehow, and still AJAX fetched the same info 4x on page load because the "MVCC" or whatever it's called didn't even buy them the abstraction of using the same values multiple times on one page...

You know, I’ve always loved C and doing my own memory management. I love learning optimization techniques and applying them.

That's awesome, and honestly who knows what you'll come up with if you're given time to follow your passion there. Decades ago SCM was done through CVS and SVN and other pieces of garbage until Linus came out with Git which a main reason that it is so good IMO is its speed. Google Chrome arrived on the scene in a lot of the same way (of course now it's as bloated a cow as any other browser, but at the time it was faster than anything available).

I don’t think you can blame people for trending away from quality software. Its clearly against the grain.

No definitely not. Electron is basically a creation of idiot middle management who insist that the web app and the app app be the same exact thing and be developed by the same group of understaffed, underpaid, underappreciated developers. So they worked out a framework to make it so they could change something in one place and have it reflected everywhere.

But it's still as potato as it gets.

I have tons of firefox tabs open, even on my telephone. I'm quite sure they just get unloaded /not loaded if not used?

Yeah, but those shouldn't really influence memory usage too much unless actively used, right? I'm pretty sure browsers unload unused tabs from memory.

I myself sometimes use quite a lot of tabs, although I have to admit it's definitely not close to 80 tabs open at all times.

Right! IDE is probably the missing piece. I use Neovim exclusively so I didn't even think about this.

128 GB here which runs out if I compile the complete project at work with -j32. And this sucks because 128 GB right now means the RAM cannot run super fast, meaning it is a bottleneck to any modern Ryzen...

Sure, but I’m just playing around with small quantized models on my laptop with integrated graphics and the RAM was insanely cheap. It just interests me what LLMs are capable of that can be run on such hardware. For example, llama 3.2 3B only needs about 3.5 GB of RAM, runs at about 10 tokens per second and while it’s in no way comparable to the LLMs that I use for my day to day tasks, it doesn’t seem to be that bad. Llama 3.1 8B runs at about half that speed, which is a bit slow, but still bearable. Anything bigger than that is too slow to be useful, but still interesting to try for comparison.

I’ve got an old desktop with a pretty decent GPU in it with 24 GB of VRAM, but it’s collecting dust. It’s noisy and power hungry (older generation dual socket Intel Xeon) and still incapable of running large LLMs without additional GPUs. Even if it were capable, I wouldn’t want it to be turned on all the time due to the noise and heat in my home office, so I’ve not even tried running anything on it yet.

Good idea, although I don't have my own house yet since I'm still a teen, and absolutely nobody would trust me to implement PiHole on our router lmao

Codium or VScode and Signal are not available as Browser Apps afaik. And for Spotify - I rarely use that - but when I do it's nice to have the songs downloaded wich only exists in the Proton APP Version.