RAM is the kind of thing you’re better off having too much than not enough. Worst case the OS ends up with a very healthy and large file cache, which frees up your storage and makes things a bit faster/lets it spend the CPU on other things. If anything, your machine is future proofed against the ever increasing RAM hungriness of web apps. But if you run out of it, you get apps killed, hangs or major slowdowns as it hits the swap.

The thing with RAM is that it’s easy for 99% of your workload to fit comfortably, and then there’s one thing you temporarily need a bit more and you’re screwed. My machine usually uses 8-12/32GB of RAM but yet I still ended up needing to add swap to my machine. Just opening up the Lemmy source code and spinning up the Rust LSP can use a solid 8+GB alone. I’ve compiled some AUR packages that needed more than 16GB of RAM. I have 16 cores so compiling anything with -j32 can very quickly bring down a machine to its knees even if each compile thread is only using like 256-512MB each.

Another example: my netbook has 8GB. 99% of the time it’s fine, because it’s a web browsing machine, and I probably average on 4GB usage on a heavy day with lots of tabs open. But if I open up VSCode and use any LSP be it TypeScript or Rust, the machine immediately starts swapping aggressively. I had to log out of my graphical session to compile Lemmy, barely.

RAM is cheap enough these days it’s nice to have more than you need to not ever have to worry about it.

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)

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 or memsum 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.

I remember my brother ringing me and telling me that he’d managed to wedge 40MB of RAM into his PC. Yes MB. That was when a 1MB stick costed about £30 a pop. It seemed rather insane at the time. Bear in mind that on DOS/Windows machines at the time, you fiddled with himem.sys and autoexec.bat to wrestle memory regions.

Several years later I got a T shirt from Novell (Cool Solutions) for a pretty decent boot floppy disc image that was able to run with a lot of different network cards and still manage to run “ghost” without falling over.

Much earlier, I upgraded my 80206 PC with 1MB of RAM with an 80207 maths co-processor so I could run AutoCAD on it. Yes it did! The next version required 32MB of RAM, which at the time looked pretty mad to the likes of me.

32GB RAM … … modern apps generally will use whatever you have. The OS will disc cache, if nothing else.

Just wait. In 10 years 32 gig is on the low side to just run the OS. Hardware getest faster and bigger, but software scales with it.

The more resources are available, the more people will program computers to use them.

My first graphics card had 128mb memory. These days it goes in gigabyte and they use the memory and processing power to produce amazing things.

On the other hand, they also are not as critical on efficiëncy as used to be, because there are simply more resources available anyway. As a consequence, some programs use a silly amount of resources for basically doing nothing. Sometimes I really feel like my browser is eating RAM…

Build everything from source ;p

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.

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

With the rate at which Electron applications catch on? Nothing, you’ll end up using it all in a few years time.

“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

Run different virtual machines for different purposes. For example, you can have a VM that does all its networking over a VPN and downloads torrents in the background while you do other things. Or you can run other OSs in VMs.

Also, containerized software is everywhere now and it uses more resources. Extra memory helps.

Open ten tabs in Chrome. Maybe even twelve!

I don’t think you need 32GB of RAM. 16GB should be enough, and 8 will still do for light tasks (though modern apps and websites are starting to push that, which is terrible). Your OS uses any RAM you don’t use to cache files, which speeds up your system, reduces power consumption, and could save you some SSD wear by caching the writes.

If you haven’t already, you can mount a tmpfs over your browsers’ cache directories (a bunch of them in ~/.cache or ~/. config). It used to really speed up browsing back in the HDD days. I doubt it’s still necessary, but hey you’ve got plenty of RAM, right?

If you really don’t do anything but browsing, you could boot your entire OS into RAM and have a 0 SSD latency browsing experience.

You could also use the RAM to run a bunch of VMs or containers. I used to run a separate Pihole VM, for example; virtual machines are nice and isolated, so you don’t risk ruining your /etc directory with a billion different configured services. The big downside of running such stuff on your machine is that you quickly end up with a whole bunch of duplicates (I have like four versions of postgres running on a server somewhere because I’m lazy) but if you have RAM to spare, that doesn’t matter.

One container that may be worth looking at is Waydroid (or Anbox if you’re on X11) to run Android apps on your desktop. I find that a bunch of different services have web interfaces thst just don’t work as well as their apps, and running those can be nice. How much of a difference this makes will depend on the services you use, of course.

Lastly: don’t underestimate the advantages of plenty of RAM when programming. It’ll depend on what language you use, but many compilers will generate a million tiny files that will all be written to disk and read back. SSDs are fast, but random reads are still nowhere close to RAM speed. Your OS will hide most of this overhead, but I definitely felt the difference going from 16GB to 32GB because of file system caching alone.

Run your own ai to help with coding

Doesn’t your browser take it all yet? Don’t worry, web frameworks’ developers are working on that.

Nothing, there is no reason to put that much RAM on your system if you don’t even know what to do with it. “What is someone who only uses his car to commute supposed to do with a supercar?”