Comment by humanfromearth9

Comment by humanfromearth9 18 hours ago

21 replies

Last night, while writing a LaTeX article, with Ollama running for other purposes, Firefox with its hundreds of tabs, multiple PDF files open, my laptop's memory usage spiked up to 80GB RAM usage... And I was happy to have 128GB. The spike was probably due to some process stuck in an effing loop, but the process consuming more and more RAM didn't have any impact on the system's responsiveness, and I could calmly quit VSCode and restart it with all the serenity I could have in the middle of the night. Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?

hylaride 9 hours ago

> Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?

It depends. It takes more energy, which can be undesirable in battery powered devices like laptops and phones. Higher end memory can also generate more heat, which can be an issue.

But otherwise more RAM is usually better. Many OS's will dynamically use otherwise unused RAM space to cache filesystem reads, making subsequent reads faster and many databases will prefetch into memory if it is available, too.

philsnow 8 hours ago

Firefox is particularly good at having lots of tabs open and not using tons of memory.

    $ ~/dev/mozlz4-tool/target/release/mozlz4-tool \
        "$(find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -name recovery.jsonlz4 | head -1)" | \
        jq -r '[.windows[].tabs | length] | add'
    5524
Activity monitor claims firefox is using 3.1GB of ram.

    Real memory size:      2.43 GB
    Virtual memory size: 408.30 GB
    Shared memory size:  746.5  MB
    Private memory size: 377.3  MB
That said, I wholeheartedly agree that "more RAM less problems". The only case I can think of when it's not strictly better to have more is during hibernation (cf sleep) when the system has to write 128GB of ram to disk.
  • autoexec 7 hours ago

    In my experience firefox is "pretty good" about having lots of tabs and windows open if you don't mind it crashing every week or two.

    • lemoncookiechip 7 hours ago

      I've not had a crash on Firefox in like a decade, basically since the Quantum update in like 2016.

      • autoexec 6 hours ago

        Try living like I do. I currently have 1,838 tabs open across 9 different windows. On second thought, maybe don't live like I do...

zrail 15 hours ago

On consumer chips the more memory modules you have the slower they all run. I.e. if you have a single module of DDR5 it might run at 5600MHz but if you have four of them they all get throttled to 3800MHz.

  • PunchyHamster 2 hours ago

    But you can easily have 128GB and still on 2 modules

    • J_Shelby_J 16 minutes ago

      Larger capacity is usually slower though. The fastest ram is typically 16 or 32 capacity.

      The OP is talking about a specific niche of boosting single thread performance. It’s common with gaming pcs since most games are single thread bottlenecked. 5% difference may seem small, but people are spending hundreds or thousands for less gains… so buying the fastest ram can make sense there.

  • drtgh 10 hours ago

    Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels, but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer processors had always two channels, with exception of Threadriper?).

    However this does not make sense, as for more than a decade the processors have only grown increasing the number of threads, therefore two channels sounds like a negligent and deliberately imposed bottleneck to access the memory if one use all those threads (Lets say 3D render, Video postproduction, Games, and so on).

    And if one want four channels to surpass such imposed bottleneck, the mainboards that nowadays have four channels don't contemplate consumer use, therefore they have one or two USB connectors with three or four LAN connectors at prohibitive prices.

    We are talking about consumer quad-channel DDR4 machines ten years old, wildly spread, keeps being competent compared with current consumers ones, if not better. It is like if all were frozen along this years (and what remains to be seen with such pattern).

    Now it is rumoured that AMD may opt for four channels for its consumer lines due to the increased number of pin connectors (good news if true).

    It is a bad joke what the industry is doing to customers.

    • wtallis 8 hours ago

      > Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels, but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer processors had always two channels, with exception of Threadriper?).

      You need to re-check your sources. When AMD started doing integrated memory controllers in 2003, they had Socket 754 (single channel / 64-bit wide) for low-end consumer CPUs and Socket 940 (dual channel / 128-bit wide) for server and enthusiast destkop CPUs, but less than a year later they introduced Socket 939 (128-bit) and since then their mainstream desktop CPU sockets have all had a 128-bit wide memory interface. When Intel later also moved their memory controller from the motherboard to the CPU, they also used a 128-bit wide memory bus (starting with LGA 1156 in 2008).

      There's never been a desktop CPU socket with a memory bus wider than 128 bits that wasn't a high-end/workstation/server counterpart to a mainstream consumer platform that used only a 128-bit wide memory bus. As far as I can tell, the CPU sockets supporting integrated graphics have all used a 128-bit wide memory bus. Pretty much all of the growth of desktop CPU core counts from dual core up to today's 16+ core parts has been working with the same bus width, and increased DRAM bandwidth to feed those extra cores has been entirely from running at higher speeds over the same number of wires.

      What has regressed is that the enthusiast-oriented high-end desktop CPUs derived from server/workstation parts are much more expensive and less frequently updated than they used to be. Intel hasn't done a consumer-branded variant of their workstation CPUs in several generations; they've only been selling those parts under the Xeon branding. AMD's Threadripper line got split into Threadripper and Threadripper PRO, but the non-PRO parts have a higher starting price than early Threadripper generations, and the Zen 3 generation didn't get non-PRO Threadrippers.

      • zozbot234 7 hours ago

        At some point the best "enthusuast-oriented HEDT" CPU's will be older-gen Xeon and EPYC parts, competing fairly in price, performance and overall feature set with top-of-the-line consumer setups.

  • [removed] 10 hours ago
    [deleted]
  • imtringued 14 hours ago

    Mainboards have two memory channels so you should be able to reach 5600mhz on both and dual slot mainboards have better routing than quad slot mainboards. This means the practical limit for consumer RAM is 2x48GB modules.

Jyaif 15 hours ago

> Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?

RAM uses power.

  • epolanski 13 hours ago

    It also consumes more physical space. /s

    • 1718627440 8 hours ago

      Not really /s, since it is a limited resource in e.g. Laptops.