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Comment by rmk2 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely fail to see the point here. Why should I use this? Is this again one of these instances where, magically, free RAM is good?

30 tabs opened simultaneously (with AdBlock, Ghostery and Disconnect), alongside Thunderbird, Emacs (+daemon) and a full DE run up to 1.8GiB of RAM used on my machine, which is everything but fast, new, or fancy. Consequently, I still have 2GB of RAM remaining that are not directly needed (and hence used for caching by the OS).

I'm writing all this from a Core2Duo laptop, so really, when exactly does any computer bought at the same time (or since) have actual problems of running out of memory? I have not experienced such problems in years on anything other than a Raspberry Pi. Is this a problem that really needs solving?

Feel free to point me to use cases where this is essential or useful, for I cannot see any.

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Well, yay for you. As I posted in the Firefox thread, when I checked this morning I had 16 tabs open using 2.6GiB of memory, and that without the using websites like Facebook and Twitter that I've found to be memory pigs in the past. I use AdBlock, maybe Ghostery and Disconnect are magic?

In general, my machine has 8GiB of RAM and low-memory thrashing / out-of-memory errors are pretty much a daily occurrence. They're certainly not all Chrome's fault, but I don't think it is helping matters any.

My post was in no way meant to be boasting, quite the contrary, it assumes that my computer is on the lower end of what will be widely used, especially here on HN.

> In general, my machine has 8GiB of RAM and low-memory thrashing / out-of-memory errors are pretty much a daily occurrence. They're certainly not all Chrome's fault, but I don't think it is helping matters any.

I suppose the choice of operating systems has to do with this as well, since a browser can only do so much if the underlying OS handles memory allocation in a less than ideal way. This at least sounds like it might a problem that is situated on a much lower level than your browser dealing with multiple tabs.

"...when exactly does any computer bought at the same time (or since) have actual problems of running out of memory?"

Ah yes, I remember the days being a dev that didn't use VMs. It kinda sucked as a development environment that said: no easy way to test software on different OSes locally, no easy way to try other software which you don't necessarily trust in a confined environment (to see if it may be worth using, in which case you'd look into the trust issue more closely), etc.

If you're a dev and have "enough RAM" you're probably not trying hard enough ; )

VMs tend to use quite a lot of memory and tend to be very useful for knowledgable devs.

You asked and seemed so cocksure so these were my 2 cents...

So, in that case, when you are developing, you are actively using multiple VMs and 30++ tabs? Maybe I am just bad at multitasking, but while I do see the point of the VMs, I don't see how they fundamentally change the overall picture.

I don't doubt that you can manage to fill an arbitrary amount of RAM running multiple browsers, VMs and other programs, however, I do fail to see how that in turn enhances (or constricts) productivity. Multiple VMs? Sure. Multiple browsers? Sure. Multiple VMs and browsers? Sure. Multiple VMs, browsers and multiple dozen tabs? I don't see a use case here.

If you have multiple multi-gigabyte VMs running, chances are its not your brower's RAM usage that is hamstringing you by using all available RAM.

edit: I'm not saying I don't see a use case were theoretically there are tangible limits on RAM which become a problem, but to me, it remains exactly that: theoretical.

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