Hot take: in 2024, 8GB of memory is enough for non-enthusiasts

[Mark Kaine]

21 minutes ago, starsmine said:

The thing is, gaming is NOT enthusiast behavior.

yeh i totally don't follow the gamers are enthusiasts line either, especially when there are other groups who probably need a lot more ram (video/film editors etc) 

[Mark Kaine]

23 hours ago, Vishera said:

There is no way you will run Firefox on modern websites with only 512MB of RAM

If you look at the screenshot you will see that running Firefox with the LTT forums consumes more than 700MB of RAM

I'll never understand why browsers take up so much space for people... are you saying a single site/tab uses 700mb?

 

how come 90+ chrome tabs (all of them videos) take up just roughly twice of that on my w10 machine then?

 

 

imo 1 website like a forum shouldn't use up more than like 100-150mb tops!

 

 

sorry if i misunderstood but 700mb for a website is extremely excessive in my view.

 

case in point:

 

 

ps: heres just chrome + ltt

 

 

still far less than 700mb

[starsmine]

9 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

I'll never understand why browsers take up so much space for people... are you saying a single site/tab uses 700mb?

 

how come 90+ tabs (all of them videos) take up just roughly twice of that on my w10 machine then?

 

 

imo 1 website like a forum shouldn't use up more than like 100-150mb tops!

 

 

sorry if i misunderstood but 700mb for a website is extremely excessive in my view.

 

case in point:

 

 

 

 

A lot of your tabs are killed btw. As in not actually loaded. 

 

[Beerzerker]

In truth, it's all relative to how the machine is being used.

What it's used for is one thing - Another is how a user is using it, such as when someone likes having a million tabs open all at once while web browsing and experiences performance "Lag".... That's more of a user-induced problem.

If gaming well, YEAH.... You do need more or for things like video encoding, editing, photo shop... Stuff like that but for a simple web browsing machine, 8GB's (As of this post) is fine as long as you don't go nuts with leaving tabs open everywhere you go.

You must remember, RAM is just a resource, limited by how much is in the machine in the first place and having alot of tabs open consumes available RAM, and can lead to things not working right in the first place.

Also having alot of background processes running for things, like an anti-virus program for example will consume RAM too because it takes RAM to some extent for it to function like all the rest does.

What you have the machine for matters but it's also about how you use it too.

[YoungBlade]

On 1/21/2024 at 12:23 PM, seanondemand said:

Extra spicy. I mean, paired up with a decent SSD to page to, you’re probably right, but 4GB memory and a decent SSD is probably an uncommon combo. 

Given how dirt cheap SSDs are right now, at least in the US, I don't see why you wouldn't have an SSD in every computer.

 

My mom is using an old desktop from 2008 with 4GB of RAM. It has a Core 2 Quad Q9400 and 128GB SATA SSD. And for her usecase, it's totally fine. The fact that it's also running Linux, rather than Windows, really helps.

 

And as for 8GB, that's what her laptop has, and it can do Windows 10 just fine as well.

 

So yes, 8GB of RAM is more than enough for web browsing and office work. But for productivity and gaming, it's rough.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, starsmine said:

A lot of your tabs are killed btw. As in not actually loaded

yeah, why would i run 90+ videos simultaneously? is that something people really do?

 

but point still stands, just this forum takes much less than 700mb on my pc. 

 

ps: also interesting steam uses way more on your machine than on mine... that's the sort of thing i meant, i just don't understand why there are often these massive differences (especially regarding chrome memory usage, but apparently also elsewhere) 

 

i honestly thought they finally optimized steam to use less, but i guess not! : D

 

[Kisai]

57 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah, why would i run 90+ videos simultaneously? is that something people really do?

 

but point still stands, just this forum takes much less than 700mb on my pc. 

 

ps: also interesting steam uses way more on your machine than on mine... that's the sort of thing i meant, i just don't understand why there are often these massive differences (especially regarding chrome memory usage, but apparently also elsewhere) 

 

i honestly thought they finally optimized steam to use less, but i guess not! : D

 

Because Steam uses Chromium. See the thread about Steam not supporting Windows 7 or older, which is because they updated Chromium.  So each sub-process reflects something different in Steam. The largest process is the library and the store. I have around 1000 items (844 games)

 

Contrast that with Epic which has 334 games. Epic has TWO stores in it, one for games and one for Unreal Engine

 

Or GOG

 

or EA

Or Ubisoft Connect, which is the single WORST launcher of them all. Asking for admin privileges 5 times to update and then forgetting the password again. So what you see below is just the LOGIN box.

 

To add insult to injury, the Ubisoft stuff is some of the least stable software of them all, and since Ubisoft's games all require it to run, or do matchmaking, that means even if you buy the game on Steam, you can't even play it (similar to EA.) 

 

So if you have all this crap on the device just because you "might" play a game. That is 3GB of RAM just being used up, doing nothing. This stuff doesn't even get paged out because they behave like entire web browsers, not tabs.

 

If I close ALL the chrome tabs and have just THIS page:

Yes, 1.4GB just to sit there and write this post.

The tab may be 105MB, but the GPU process is 1.2GB, and the core browser process is 470MB.

 

Firefox, fresh load, no tabs open, 400MB:

Firefox, THIS page open, 675MB:

 

Opera GX, no tabs open 402MB:

 

Opera GX, THIS page open, 446MB, Hardware acceleration OFF:

 

So, what have we learned? The web browser, regardless of which one it is, never uses less than 400MB, and neither do the game launchers. So unless you are closing completely out of these programs entirely before launching another, you are leaving as much as half the RAM on an 8GB system tied up.

 

And what about other tools?

Davinci uses 1.9GB just to have a 5 SECOND 1080p video. (This goes up to 2.2GB with a 1HR Video with only two layers.)

 

And games that are ports of mobile games that are ports of PC games from the 1990's?

 

Games be pretty far apart in resource requirements

 

Here's another example, this is Stanley Parable Ultra deluxe, made in Unity:

But here is the previous version made in Source Engine:

As you can see, there's only 150MB difference between the two, but the Unity version is 64bit. However, look at the CPU usage. 1% vs 9%. GPU? 7.6% vs 26.9% (this is an RTX 3090)

 

When it comes to games, how old and what engine it's on matters a fair bit. Games that are built on Unity can either be pretty light, or extremely heavy, and often don't scale to more powerful hardware once it reaches as much as it can use. So in that regard, yes, there's probably plenty of mobile ports of games that might be fine on 8GB, but you aren't going to know how much it uses unless you're monitoring for it, and often people don't realize that having more RAM so you never touch the swap is ideal. If a game or an application leaks memory, it will KEEP leaking memory until all RAM and swap is consumed, and then the computer crashes when it starts killing things to try and save itself.

 

 

 

[Lurking]

10 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

This forum (and frankly the whole LTT community) consists mostly of gamers, for which gaming is an everyday task. So you might fare better by just saying office-type work. And in that case i agree. My parents probably also don't need more than 8GB for a bit of browsing.

If someone says "Office work" I wouldn't assume someone just writing a letter to the landlord every 3 months. Office work would be a few spreadsheets, Word documents, and browser open plus outlook. Some PDF open as well Add some simple industry specific software a company uses. Add Zoom meetings. That would be what an admin person has to run simultaneously without the computer bogging down. No way 8 GB will suffice for that without being painful. 

[Lurking]

10 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

This forum (and frankly the whole LTT community) consists mostly of gamers, for which gaming is an everyday task. So you might fare better by just saying office-type work. And in that case i agree. My parents probably also don't need more than 8GB for a bit of browsing.

If someone says "Office work" I wouldn't assume someone just writing a letter to the landlord every 3 months. Office work would be a few spreadsheets, Word documents, and browser open plus outlook. Some PDF open as well Add some simple industry specific software a company uses. Add Zoom meetings. That would be what an admin person has to run simultaneously without the computer bogging down. No way 8 GB will suffice for that without being painful. 

[seanondemand]

45 minutes ago, Lurking said:

If someone says "Office work" I wouldn't assume someone just writing a letter to the landlord every 3 months. Office work would be a few spreadsheets, Word documents, and browser open plus outlook. Some PDF open as well Add some simple industry specific software a company uses. Add Zoom meetings. That would be what an admin person has to run simultaneously without the computer bogging down. No way 8 GB will suffice for that without being painful. 

Thing is though, in combination with a reasonably okay ssd, paging works really well for applications that don’t really push the system that hard, like documents, web browsing, and email, which is what a huge chunk of the computing public’s primary workload looks like. 

[creat0r]

On 1/21/2024 at 6:16 PM, seanondemand said:

8 GB of memory is enough for daily use, which for most normal people (that is, non LTT forum readers)

Agreed. Computers also have gotten really fast SSD nowadays which means they can write SWAP memory to the SSD if they occasionally need to exceed the 8 GB.

[creat0r]

On 1/21/2024 at 6:40 PM, flibberdipper said:

On Windows? Not really

For Mac? Yes. My 17” MacBook Pro from 2010 runs like a charm with 4 GB RAM.

[jre84]

I was at 16gb ram with my gaming laptop. heard a fuss about gaming with less than 32gb, upgraded to 64gb for the sake of it. 0 difference in daily usage/gaming. I suppose if I played hogwarts I'd benefit, I think we won't be needing 32-64gb for a few more years, right now we are on the cusp and 16gb is fine.

 

i'd like to add, I use atlas OS and I think with a few tweaks to services with ESO services optimiser im seeing 77 processes with chrome open playing spotify and it takes up 2.6gb of ram. if your on a tight budget and can only afford 4gb-8gb ram I'd look into tweaked OSes like ATLAS OS(or linux), they are free.

[RabbidEwok]

For mac yes, for windows you’re really wanting 16GB now, seagull if you use chrome 

[NobleGamer]

On 1/23/2024 at 8:56 PM, creat0r said:

Computers also have gotten really fast SSD nowadays which means they can write SWAP memory to the SSD if they occasionally need to exceed the 8 GB.

They can but that doesn't mean they should, because:

On 1/23/2024 at 5:43 PM, Kisai said:

often people don't realize that having more RAM so you never touch the swap is ideal. If a game or an application leaks memory, it will KEEP leaking memory until all RAM and swap is consumed, and then the computer crashes when it starts killing things to try and save itself.

 

Aside from potential stability issues mentioned, let's say that a non-enthusiast has a 256GB SSD with TBW of 150 (which happens to match 970 EVO PLUS).

 

If there's at least 8 GB of writes per day to swap file on 5 days per week for 5 years, that will use at least over 10 TBW which is 7% of warrantied drive life. So its not trivial if the user has RAM intensive or leaking apps or if they use their system everyday.

[emothxughts]

8GB DDR3 is just enough for my office work PC (obviously not so for home gaming PC).

 

But it also needs an SSD so badly. I work with large Excel files daily, and the HDD is...bottlenecking me.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, NobleGamer said:

They can but that doesn't mean they should, because:

 

Aside from potential stability issues mentioned, let's say that a non-enthusiast has a 256GB SSD with TBW of 150 (which happens to match 970 EVO PLUS).

 

If there's at least 8 GB of writes per day to swap file on 5 days per week for 5 years, that will use at least over 10 TBW which is 7% of warrantied drive life. So its not trivial if the user has RAM intensive or leaking apps or if they use their system everyday.

That's not how swap works. The OS or application goes "I need X many bytes" and the memory manager goes "no contiguous memory of that size, page faulting" and then allocates memory from the page file and swaps something out to meet the contiguous memory needed. So it might ask for 1K byte, but might be kicking out 1MB from the RAM to swap, and repeating this continuously during a leak.

 

Memory management is complicated, but it's actually LESS complicated than it was in the Windows 95/3.1 era which involved moving things in 64K blocks in conventional memory (EMS) to access up to 32MB.

 

Often what happens in Windows is that an application either rapidly leaks due to malloc's inside loops without associated free's, or due to linked-lists without end. This is why "reference counting" instead of garbage collection is the current trend, because it's more expensive to free memory, and in software like games and media applications you induce micro-stutters (yes, even in the web browser) if you rely on automatic garbage collection.

 

A lot of whine about performance comes back to trying to do too much with too little. If you have the option to, you should have more RAM than you think you need, not less. CPU and GPU performance won't matter if the CPU wastes half it's time paging out. The worst possible situation is having a GPU with insufficient VRAM and also insufficient RAM in the system so the OS pages out GPU memory. 

 

[NobleGamer]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

That's not how swap works. The OS or application goes "I need X many bytes" and the memory manager goes "no contiguous memory of that size, page faulting" and then allocates memory from the page file and swaps something out to meet the contiguous memory needed. So it might ask for 1K byte, but might be kicking out 1MB from the RAM to swap, and repeating this continuously during a leak.

Thanks for the insights.

 

If I understand your workflow example above:

 

You are saying that if some RAM amount requested by an application isnt free, then some amount of RAM equal to or greater than the new amount requested gets moved to swap file (on SSD), correct?

 

And am I correct to assume that if enough RAM frees up, then swap file content will be "moved" back to the RAM?

 

And given that a page file is literally a single file on the SSD, then wouldnt that mean "moving" files off the SSD would consist of an equivalent amount of writes to the page file to remove the "moved" content of that file?

 

 

If any of those 3 things are true, then I think that makes even more of a case that SSD endurance with such little RAM would be even less trivial for non-enthusiasts.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, NobleGamer said:

 

 

You are saying that if some RAM amount requested by an application isnt free, then some amount of RAM equal to or greater than the new amount requested gets moved to swap file (on SSD), correct?

Yes, though it depends if the user has changed the default settings. If you have it on OS determined, it will allocate space indefinitely and never free it up until the system reboots.

There are three SSD's in my system, but the "page file" is on C because that's the PCIe4 drive. The others are PCIe3 and SATA. There's also two 18TB 7200RPM drives, which I do NOT want to be touched for pagefile.

 

So while I have 96GB RAM, it's not allocating the typical "Suggested" page file size that you'd follow going back to Windows 3.0 which is 2x system memory. This page file is allocated because you need the page file enabled for BSOD's to write a dump file.

 

1 hour ago, NobleGamer said:

And am I correct to assume that if enough RAM frees up, then swap file content will be "moved" back to the RAM?

Nope. It will stay in the page file until it's requested again, or you use a tool that "cleans up memory" which is unnecessary and probably even damaging to the SSD if you have too little memory.

 

1 hour ago, NobleGamer said:

And given that a page file is literally a single file on the SSD, then wouldnt that mean "moving" files off the SSD would consist of an equivalent amount of writes to the page file to remove the "moved" content of that file?

It wouldn't be one contiguous file, so while on a SSD this is no longer relevant, but allocating memory in sub-block sizes would actually induce a lot more write wear. On a mechanical drive, this is what gives it that "chugging" sound as the drive seek time impairs the performance of the computer.

 

Like until computers had 32GB of RAM, if you turned off the page file, eg to defragment it, you'd usually run out of RAM pretty quickly and the OS would kill things with error messages about running out of memory or disk space (as the OS isn't stupid and will try to save itself by making temporary page files.  

 

1 hour ago, NobleGamer said:

 

If any of those 3 things are true, then I think that makes even more of a case that SSD endurance with such little RAM would be even less trivial for non-enthusiasts.

If it came down to more RAM or more Disk space, more RAM would be more important.

 

SSD's have two issues that mechanical drives do not have

- They wear quickly the fuller they are, the ideal amount of "free space" on a SSD is half the drive free.

- They slow down as they wear out.

- They are instantly, completely, erased under certain conditions such as power surges or botched firmware updates.

 

Where as mechanical drives 

- are different speeds depending where the file is on the drive

- wear out from external forces (electrical failures/power surges, accidently dropping the laptop, or kicking the desktop when it's on the floor)

 

You can usually "save" a mechanical drive by paritioning it around damaged spots, like one drive I basically got another 5 years out of by making "the drive" start 20GB in and leaving the first 20GB unpartitioned.

 

[starsmine]

17 hours ago, RabbidEwok said:

For mac yes, for windows you’re really wanting 16GB now, seagull if you use chrome 

god no. 
The only people who should be buying the 8GB macs (today) are enthusiasts still. 

Like the only people who buy Yugo in the car world (today) are car enthusiasts. 16GB is like a Toyota corolla, it works, you don't have to baby it, it just works. 

yall who keep saying office work is fine on 8GB, we have all eaten shit on a large spreadsheet that takes massive amounts of ram that accounting sent over.
copilot which is inside office 365 for word, PowerPoint, excel, etc has a 16gb suggested requirement. This is office software. 

SSD page files are not a solution in any way shape or form, SSDs are NOT Optane. they still cause massive stuttering when swapping in the active application. If yall wanted to treat a drive like this, you should have all bought into Optane. 

No one is arguing against 8gb because you cant get 8gb to work, you can. but making 8gb work today, on modern secure operating systems like Mac or windows, requires thinking about memory management as an every day reality. Even when doing office tasks and light browsing. Something you should only ever ask an enthusiast. 

As well as the fact that sure they may not use copilot today, they will want to in 2H of this year or next, which if you have an 8gb laptop means.... buying a new laptop, again something you should not be asking a non enthusiast to do. 

For Non-enthusiasts, a computer needs to be trouble free/hassle free, and continue to be that for 5 years or more. 

Telling a non-enthusiast they burned their money on a piece of shit laptop that fails to meet those two expectations makes them feel like shit. 

Their 8 gb laptop from 3 years ago may still be fine for the next year, but not much more. 

[RabbidEwok]

On 1/25/2024 at 4:03 PM, starsmine said:

god no. 
The only people who should be buying the 8GB macs (today) are enthusiasts still. 

Like the only people who buy Yugo in the car world (today) are car enthusiasts. 16GB is like a Toyota corolla, it works, you don't have to baby it, it just works. 

yall who keep saying office work is fine on 8GB, we have all eaten shit on a large spreadsheet that takes massive amounts of ram that accounting sent over.
copilot which is inside office 365 for word, PowerPoint, excel, etc has a 16gb suggested requirement. This is office software. 

SSD page files are not a solution in any way shape or form, SSDs are NOT Optane. they still cause massive stuttering when swapping in the active application. If yall wanted to treat a drive like this, you should have all bought into Optane. 

No one is arguing against 8gb because you cant get 8gb to work, you can. but making 8gb work today, on modern secure operating systems like Mac or windows, requires thinking about memory management as an every day reality. Even when doing office tasks and light browsing. Something you should only ever ask an enthusiast. 

As well as the fact that sure they may not use copilot today, they will want to in 2H of this year or next, which if you have an 8gb laptop means.... buying a new laptop, again something you should not be asking a non enthusiast to do. 

For Non-enthusiasts, a computer needs to be trouble free/hassle free, and continue to be that for 5 years or more. 

Telling a non-enthusiast they burned their money on a piece of shit laptop that fails to meet those two expectations makes them feel like shit. 

Their 8 gb laptop from 3 years ago may still be fine for the next year, but not much more. 

Mac’s manage memory completely differently to widows machines. 

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, RabbidEwok said:

Mac’s manage memory completely differently to widows machines. 

Not differently enough to magically work with 8gb and an IGPU. the XNU kernel doesn't magically stop a chromium MALLOC for sandboxed processes. It still handles the call and goes, yes chromium, here is another 32kb.... 1000 times over. And I want to stress, IGPU is still yoinking gigs of that for its own uses. The only group who should be buying the 8gb macs are enthusiasts only macs, not entry level macs. Not people who are looking to spend 2000USD on a laptop they are trusting to just work

Its not like mac users dont also use microsoft office software 

[RabbidEwok]

28 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Not differently enough to magically work with 8gb and an IGPU. the XNU kernel doesn't magically stop a chromium MALLOC for sandboxed processes. It still handles the call and goes, yes chromium, here is another 32kb.... 1000 times over. And I want to stress, IGPU is still yoinking gigs of that for its own uses. The only group who should be buying the 8gb macs are enthusiasts only macs, not entry level macs. Not people who are looking to spend 2000USD on a laptop they are trusting to just work

Its not like mac users dont also use microsoft office software 

Not really magic but it does it. You can literally edit video on a Mac with 8GB of ram perfectly fine.

 

Which laptop is $2000 dollars with 8GB of RAM? 

[OhioYJ]

On 1/21/2024 at 5:28 PM, starsmine said:

And I would never ask a non enthusiast to use linux. 

Actually in my experience I've found many times non technical people do quite well with Linux. The less technical people are they don't have expectations of how things are or expect it to be exactly like Windows, etc. Many people I've setup PCs for just need a computer for basic things and need it to function. It's easy for a non technical user to find Firefox or Chrome no matter what the OS is. 

 

I still chuckle when I get a phone call and have to explain "Yes it's normal that it works in Linux but not in Windows." 

[Lune_]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the electron framework. The fact that everytime you launch the desktop app for Teams, Discord, Slack, Vscode, Zoom, Streamlabs OBS, Notion etc you are basically running a chromium instance that runs the website. Running them all can eat up quite some ram.

 

Funnily enough, my college courses each use a different method to communicate. One uses Teams, the other Slack, the Other Discord. So my ram gets eaten.