Ram usage

[Luka95]

First computer that i personaly bought had 4GB of ram back in 2013, after some time i upgraded to 8GB, than bought pc with 8GB, than ubgraded it to 16GB and now to 32GB of ram. But trough all that time i alwause get the feling that ram usage is somehow rising suddenly, like if you have 8GB of ram its enough for couple of years and that suddenly its not enough, so i was wondering can it be related to some microsoft update that suddenly makes windows use more ram or something like that..? Does anyone else have the same felling...?

[Chris Pratt]

Well, a big factor is the move from 16-bit to 32-bit and now to 64-bit architectures. Each jump not only enabled higher RAM capacity, but also caused the need for higher RAM capacity as it was a doubling of the register size each time. It literally takes more bits to store the same data.

 

From a programming side, less emphasis is being placed on memory optimization than in the past as well. When you only have kilobytes or megabytes to work with, literally everything you do must be as absolutely efficient as possible, or you'll quickly run out of memory. Now that we have gigabytes to play with, such micro-optimization is no longer necessary. It doesn't mean developers necessarily just go hog wild with memory usage (though that does happen), but things like simpler and more readable code can be favored over making every byte count.

 

Finally, Windows (but a some other OSes as well) now liberally cache things in RAM to improve the overall performance of the system. When you close an application for example, Windows doesn't necessarily free all the RAM it was consuming, just in case you happen to open it again. This doesn't actually affect your available memory, as if it's under pressure, Windows will release it, but it makes the reporting of RAM utilization much higher than it would otherwise be.

[manikyath]

the biggest hog with memory usage is a mixture of lazy developers not optimizing, and end users running way too many background programs.

 

i am extremely opposed to the notion that 8GB RAM is not enough for day to day usage. you can still get a lot done on 8GB, as long as you dont run MSI levels of bloatware in the background.

 

also.. if anything windows is on a trend towards less memory overhead. background software on the other hand..

- just about any RGB application is an absolutely horrid piece of bloat

- the amount of software that has a background service to check for updates WAY more often than makes sense... is worrying.

- these days most motherboards, graphics cards, mice, keyboards, laptops, game controllers, etc.. all have their own control panel and system tray utility. which is ridiculous...

- the horrid habit of some people to NEVER turn off or reboot their system is slowly raising an epidemic of people calling to their tech support about high memory usage, because even the smallest memory leak will be a disaster if given enough time. i've defenately seen otherwise very small software consume 2GB memory just because the owner of the laptop had been putting the laptop in sleep mode every day for the past 3 weeks.