Yes and no.

Ram is a shared resource. Shared resources cant just be monopolized.

On a linux box, 'unused' ram is used for a variety of filesystem and process caches. These are designed and used in a way, that when ram need pressure rises, these get evicted, cleared, recompacted, then provided as allocation for user processes that need it. The ram is never just sitting there 'doing nothing'.

However, the notion of 'RESOURCES ARE MEANT TO BE USED!! LULZORS!', without the sobering notion of 'no, shared resources cannot be monopolized, ever', results in very shitty, poorly behaved software, and shitty, even more poorly behaved software makers.

A switch to being concientious about shared resource use is what has been mandated here.

Doing so does *NOT* leave resources 'UNUSED!'

I am a tyrant over my computer. My programs are not citizens, they are slaves.

Right now they are very fat and lazy slaves. I would like to change that.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-08-31, 19:03:

"Windows ate my RAM"

"Chrome ate my RAM"

Too bad, it is there to be eaten.

Your entitled, lazy attitude is why things are so damn bloated, buggy and inefficient today. And also why "Hello, World!" programs now occupy 100 mb of memory! For shame.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-08-31, 19:57:

True to a point. At the same time, devs shouldn't be using this as an excuse to push out bloated, buggy, memory leaky code.

There is something to be said for excellence in work and what has been happening for the past many years is nowhere near excellent.

I get the impression that we don't agree often, but on this issue we are in complete agreement. Any decent developer should endeavour to be as efficient as reasonably possible, not adding layer upon layer of libraries and frameworks just for the sake of it, or because it makes their work slightly easier — the revolting, preposterous, wasteful and shameful kludge known as Electron is but one example. If sloppy developers are gobbling up so much memory just to launch an application, what happens when someone actually wants to load a large document or dataset for processing within said application, or do something else at the same time? No, the solution is not, "so buy more memory", and as we've been discussing here, that is getting expensive, when the parts can be found at all. There is absolutely no justification for my toothbrush or shaver having more memory and processing power than a > 99%-reliability POTS switch, space vehicle or satellite that will be in orbit for decades!

If you had told any decent developer in 1995 that a Web browser would one day consume gigabytes of memory, on its own, they would have either fallen over laughing or been terrified, and you would have been hauled away in restraints and taken a ride in a padded truck. For all of the memory being wasted these days, we haven't seen a corresponding increase in stability, security or functionality. I don't know if they should be more ashamed to be releasing this sort of garbage, or if we should, because we have come to accept and allow it.

It is interesting how browsing the web and checking email used to be the least demanding things you could do with a computer, but are now among the most demanding.

(I am currently using an old core 2 duo machine with 8 GB of RAM. I have only one browser open and two or three tabs, but CPU and memory utilization have been at 100% for hours.)

https://pcper.com/2026/08/memory-prices-indef … s-through-2030/

zyzzle wrote on 2026-08-31, 20:24:

Your entitled, lazy attitude is why things are so damn bloated, buggy and inefficient today. And also why "Hello, World!" programs now occupy 100 mb of memory! For shame.

Lol, what should he be doing about it? Complaining endlessly on the internet like most everyone else in this thread? Whining doesn't seem to be working, maybe try something else.

badmojo wrote on Yesterday, 00:41:

zyzzle wrote on 2026-08-31, 20:24:

Your entitled, lazy attitude is why things are so damn bloated, buggy and inefficient today. And also why "Hello, World!" programs now occupy 100 mb of memory! For shame.

Lol, what should he be doing about it? Complaining endlessly on the internet like most everyone else in this thread? Whining doesn't seem to be working, maybe try something else.

His opinions, and ours, are irrelevant.

Google has handed down strong instructions vis-a-vis Android development. Apps that do not comply (and thus, developers that insist that their applications must consume all the available ram, since they are the foreground application, and that anything else is just preposterous) will be delisted from the store.

This is due to the fact that RAM is very much unobtanium now, and Google is having to adapt to survive.

It is quite likely to be a "floated balloon". They are seeing if this demand sticks or not. (If it doesn't, then there will have to be other concessions made, elsewhere, somehow.)

The major opinions are these:

1) Resources exist to be consumed, and if you arent consuming them, they go to waste.

2) Resources are never wasted, they are always a finite commodity, and as a producer of software, it is your duty to make your software be a good guest in the place it runs.

The issue with ram unavailability has already tipped the needle from path 1 being viable. This is why Google/Alphabet has made this decision. RAM manufacturing capacity has been sold out TWO YEARS INTO THE FUTURE at this point. RAM is simply *NOT* cheap, or easily obtainable. You *CANNOT* just tell your end users to upgrade to suit your desires in these conditions.

The reasons why people like myself, and clearly several others, point to opinion 2, is that opinion 1 only works when it is realistic to be able to "Just get more!" (or in the case of phones, "Upgrade to the NEW, BIGGER MODEL!"). As pointed out, That is not consistent with the reality we are experiencing. Further, even when you 'can', 'just get more!', that prompts the problem to only snowball. Now the user "Has More!", and, since resources exist to be consumed (And being inconsiderate of what all else has decided that resources should belong to it, and it alone, in the system), now your new version you release will be tailored for "New machines, that have more resources to use!", ad-infinitum. It drives an endlessly aggressive curve of resource requirements and utilization, "because we can, and you WILL give us what we want"

Option 2 hard-lines being a good guest, and doing the most you can with as little as you can. If you genuinely need more to do something, that's one thing-- if you just want to consume memory recklessly because you dont want to pick the correct data types for your memory structures [Like storing 8bit uints, in 32bit uints, or some other obscene thing, because you just dont want to bother considering data types at all, and rely on autotyping instead. Perhaps you decided to use a whole uint to store a boolean. Same crime-- used 8 times the memory you actually needed.], or dont care about memory leaks, or any number of other "No, this very much *IS* just lazy programming in action" type patterns, because it's faster/easier for you, then you very much *are not being a good guest*. Likewise if you think that simply because the user is statistically likely to have resources available, you are entitled to them, out of convenience-- Nevermind that we DO NOT live in a single-tasking world, and that the user may very well have other things open, that need resources, or need timeslices from the processor, or to have some semblence of statefulness (so no, trying to run at elevated priority is a nono, unless you have explicitly told the user about this, and they AGREE with that.)

"What will you do about it?" is a silly argument. I will do, and can do, NOTHING , except state the opinion, and why I hold it.

Maintainers of software ecosystems, however, Have made demands, and will enforce them.

They will do so, and ARE doing so, because No, RAM and Disk are NOT cheap and plentiful.

The people in camp 1, will either adapt, or die out in the market. That is how the cards are falling.

Web nrowsers have become what Java was supposed to become.

And java had the same problem from the get-go. It consumed large amounts of memory and resources to provide its bytecode interpreter virtual machine. Hello World was infamously memory heavy, even in the late 90s, when done with Java.

"Write once, run everywhere" has been an expensive habit for decades. Writing portable code (the original C design intention way), and defining a processor arch at compile time, produces much better results. It just requires more austerity and thought to be undertaken.

Sadly, it's also an expensive habit that its disciples wont give up easily, "Pried from my cold dead fingers" style.

If the current resource restriction trend persists into 2030, as SK Hynix predicts though, That might well come to pass.

wierd_w wrote on Yesterday, 15:09:

And java had the same problem from the get-go. It consumed large amounts of memory and resources to provide its bytecode interpreter virtual machine. Hello World was infamously memory heavy, even in the late 90s, when done with Java.

You probably didn't intend to make that point, but you've provided the perfect example, proving just how sloppy and wasteful the situation has become. Yes, Java tended to be less efficient and more "expensive" than a comparable application written in C. However, there is one extreme example in more modern times: the entire download bundle of the latest release of Ghidra (much of which was written in Java) is only a little more than double the size of the comparable download archive of an Electron application that is effectively a fancy, modern, somewhat-cross-platform replacement for WinImage. One of those is undeniably a sophisticated software package that can justify its size, and the other is decidedly not (and can't).

While the Google/Alphabet decision may (finally) be a step in the right direction, the most important applications of the world run on devices other than phones, and all developers should be paying attention. With this recent announcement, are they also promising to put Chrome on a crash diet? What about refusing to load Web pages that are too fat, and consume too many resources, or at least displaying a warning about them? Some sites lately have been loading an awful bundle of JavaScript, and repeatedly sending requests to a group of servers to load new ads every few seconds. Left alone, just trying to read news, the fans on my usual browsing machine rev up and stay that way until I close the tab. If I block the relevant servers, silence. Has it really come to this? Should loading advertising be that expensive? We should all be ashamed to have let it get this far!

640K!enough wrote on Yesterday, 20:05:

You probably didn't intend to make that point, but you've provided the perfect example, proving just how sloppy and wasteful the situation has become. Yes, Java tended to be less efficient and more "expensive" than a comparable application written in C. However, there is one extreme example in more modern times: the entire download bundle of the latest release of Ghidra (much of which was written in Java) is only a little more than double the size of the comparable download archive of an Electron application that is effectively a fancy, modern, somewhat-cross-platform replacement for WinImage. One of those is undeniably a sophisticated software package that can justify its size, and the other is decidedly not (and can't).

I had exactly the same thought. I used to consider Eclipse (a Java IDE) a ridiculously bloated program in the early 2000s, but nowadays even if you let Eclipse's Java heap grow to 1GB (it won't use even half of it), it is still peanuts compared to what other Electron-based IDEs can use. Dunno however what kind of conclusion one must extract from it, other than "the show must go on".

640K!enough wrote on 2026-08-31, 20:40:

For all of the memory being wasted these days, we haven't seen a corresponding increase in stability, security or functionality. I don't know if they should be more ashamed to be releasing this sort of garbage, or if we should, because we have come to accept and allow it.

Exactly. Exactly. This is 100% true and wiser words were never uttered. The lemmings consumers are just as much to blame as the awful software developers, for they've accepted it and been weaned on it. Partly because memory got so cheap, they didn't care. (= "There's more where THAT came from idiot mentality").

The ~1-5% of those who DON'T accept it are a rounding error to them, so they have no influence on those developers' slipshod and greedy coding ways.

I just wish a lean, memory-sipping 1995 browser were still usable on the modern, bloated, script-infested web. Wouldn't that be a dream?!

badmojo wrote on Yesterday, 00:41:

Lol, what should he be doing about it? Complaining endlessly on the internet like most everyone else in this thread? Whining doesn't seem to be working, maybe try something else.

Wasn't denigrating him specifically, but the concept. Yes, in truth, not much he or I can do except to use older software which was coded without the bloat and reduced memory requirements. And, not support the concept of greedy, memory-hungry code going forward. But, of course it's forced upon us (eg, forced obsolesence), so we can't really NOT support it either. It's a terrible problem and a paradox.

anti bloat https://tinyapps.org/