Title. Besides setting tmpfs to use 10GiB of it to store downloads.
Run not one, but two electron based apps? 😅
All jokes aside, most desktop apps and web browsers, nowadays, use ungodly amounts of RAM. The pessimist in me blames Chrome and electron, but in reality it just comes down to programmers being more accustom to having access to more memory than they need.
I say relax and enjoy the lack of slowdowns - having too much RAM is not a problem, but having too little is. Your only concern should ever be trying to avoid the latter, and with 32gb of RAM you should be good until the next big Discord update. (slight /s on that last point)
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Run your web browser from RAM for faster browsing.
2 Chrome tabs at the same time!
Nothing. My laptop has 8GB and while this is somewhat the limit, it’s enough to browse, do office stuff, a bit of development/programming and even a bit of CAD for my 3D printer, video editing, retro-gaming and all sorts of things. I’d prefer to have 16GB because Firefox likes to eat a lot of RAM, but the laptop is too old for me to upgrade anything at this point.
If you’d like to waste your resources, you could run 4 other operating systems simultaneously in VMs. Or try artificial intelligence chatbots and load one of the large language models. They can easily make use of 32GB of memory and more.
Agreed. I have ageing hardware that I upgraded to its maximum 16GB RAM, and I manage to browse the web and do basic office work with that. The most memory intensive work I do beside browsing is in GIMP, and I simply set some sensible virtual memory for that to work.
Just use a light DE, or even scale back to only a WM. People insisting that KDE or Gnome are lightweight are exactly the same who claim that 32GB RAM is a minimum. Yeah, it is when even your desktop environment is bloated 🙄
If you’re a gamer and can afford the hardware upgrades to stay at the current bleeding edge, go ahead. I keep an old box alive and make it work instead.
I have 16 gigs of ddr4 sodimms so if you happen to live close enough (unlikely) and need ddr4 i’d be willing to give it to you for free
Virtualize fun things for projects
Heh, I’ve got 32gb on my Proxmox box, and would be lying if I said I wasn’t eyeballing a few 64 or 128 sticks.
I second that, install cockpit if you don’t want to bother with the CLI and run a couple of VMs. You can even start 3 VMs and install Kubernetes on them and play with it.
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Self host some stuff.
Mount your .cache dirs into memory via tmpfs
Does it improve performance in any way? Seems a bit obvious, but I’ll ask anyways for the sake of curiosity.
yes.
Yes, and if you have an ssd, it will decrease the amount of usage that the limited(albeit ridiculously high) read/write cycles the ssd is capable of. However, it is unlikely you will hit those limits with that kind of usage, lol
Also, memory is faster always, but your usage is negligible. You can disable swap(linux/mac) or page file(windows) to force memory to be used, and your drive is used less. Firefox can be configured to disable disk cache and increase ram cache. Also, it will be noted that this cache is marked as temporary ram cache. any application that needs more ram can delete the temp cache for usage(dynamic ram usage)
But that’s it. The best thing to do is live your life and be happy that you are future proofed for any task that may arise.
“just browse the internet” doesn’t indicate that you don’t need a powerful computer in 2023. Modern browsers are really heavy - and rendering websites are much more complex now.
Unless you’re really frugal about your PC budget, I think it’s definitely “to-go” for 32G
Nothing. Don’t make up problems for your hardware, lol.
I’m guessing you listened to someone who didn’t know what they were talking about.
Here’s a little script I’ve put in my $PATH, called
memsum
:#!/usr/bin/bash /usr/bin/ps -eo rss,command --sort -rss | egrep $1 | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; sum +=hr} END {print sum}'
Now you can go:
memsum firefox
ormemsum whatever
and see that, actually, apps use a ridiculous amount of memory these days.I can get Firefox up to 8GB by using things like Office 365.
Browsers often use a lot of unreserved memory marked as free for whoever wants it. This is how you get 16GB browser sessions.
Thanks for this, it’s so easy to just run this script when I’m curious.
I got the warning “egrep: warning: egrep is obsolescent; using grep -E” so I just swapped that command to get rid of the message.
Use it for caching more stuff to make your system even faster, virtualization and most importantly, browsers
Build everything from source ;p
Run your own ai to help with coding
you can disable paging (swap) i guess apart from launching more things at the same time and letting apps know you have ram for them to cache shit (check app settings some apps do have a how much ram should we use slider like okular the kde pdf viewer) and virtualisation of multiple os’s i can’t think of much