Unused RAM is wasted RAM. This is only a problem if windows doesn’t allocate a large portion of that ram to something else if/when it needs it, which windows does.
This person fundamentally misunderstands RAM on Windows…
Apps reserve a portion of the total available memory. That memory is not necessarily in use. Memory not in use will still be available to other applications as soon as the system reallocates it when a given application needs more. Usually of you have more RAM, applications will reserve more of it. You can check a better explanation of your current memory usage in the windows resource monitor. You’ll see memory allocated, memory in use, and memory being used to cache data (which windows does to reduce disk reads and writes), as well as memory completely unallocated. Chrome can easily allocate 1/3 of your total available memory by the third tab, but that doesn’t mean chrome is actually using that much.
I don’t know who is doing the testing, but they don’t know what they’re doing. 313MB
Look at mr moneybags over here
Wouldn’t Windows 11 be the worst app on your Windows 11 PC? 🤔
Technically… Yes.
2nd after Windows.
No, the worst app is Windows 11. My parents have some all-in-one HP PC. It has some Intel laptop processor from about 8 years ago, 16GB of ram, (upgraded from 8), and a wheezy 256GB spinning drive, running Win10 adequately.
After being bombarded with “upgrade to Windows 11! It’s easy and fun!!” notifications, they did so, and of course their PC is woefully underpowered for the job.
I log in remotely and check what’s running and the OS is paging to the swap file constantly. I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft “essential services”. The biggest hog out of them all was copilot, which was using about 4GB while sitting there idle.
I have no doubt that I’m going to have to run that script every month as everything gets “repaired”, until I can get back to their place and put a SSD in and maybe install some flavour of Linux.
If you put in an ssd, Windows should run just fine.
I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft “essential services”
And then a Windows Update comes along…
If they were happy with 10 give them Mint, they won’t even notice if you skin it.
My MILs computer has 8 GB of RAM… I have not yet convinced her she needs a new computer, but I did just install windows 10 iot ltsc on it so it will at least get security patches.
put that script in task scheduler on repeat. let it run every day
Counterpoint: no, it’s not, because I’m not stupid enough to install it.
Or own a Windows PC!
Sadly, I have one that I need for some freelance work. But I don’t use it too much.
Or they’re mining your data….?
Oh, it’s most likely doing something. Just nothing you would want.
Without having read the article, lemme guess… Electron.
Maybe now that no-one can afford RAM these companies might get motivated to do something about that. Hell, I’d accept them just feeling shamed into not being the worst memory hog on your system at this point, over any altruistic reason.
See also: Discord and Slack, two other colossal wastes of space that use an order of magnitude more RAM than a native app would while running slower and providing absolutely zero other benefits.
my friend has 16gb of ram and he keeps hitting out-of-memory errors when he has like 5 apps open, because they’re all electron and they all take like 2gb each, it’s ridiculous
The worst part about electron is that there is no way for it to share resources like a browser. You have to oacjage the whole version together, when really should should have been more like a pwa. Instead you have 10 electron instances, running with 10x the respurce needs.
that’s why you just skip the middleman and run it in your browser instead.
They don’t care if you can’t afford it. Data centers are buying them by the truckload.
OP was talking about the software companies, not the ram companies
I have a Windows 11 PC with WhatsApp?
Why would anyone put WhatsApp on their computer?
Stop using meta people!
unfortunately switching away from messengers like this is much harder than other stuff cuz you have to move your entire social network over. it can be done, but unless all your friends and family are also foss and privacy nerds it’s going to be difficult
then again idk if it’s possible, but if it is, you should at least use whatsapp within a web browser. it may even consume less ram that way lol
It isn’t hard to make that move though it’s just inconvenient. I wouldn’t play along, friends and family can fuck right off if they wont leave. It’s directly funding so many nasty things I can’t be part of it.
“Stop using meta people!” sounds like a protest chant for the second-class citizens of a B-grade cyberpunk dystopia.
It’s most definitely doing alot
The doing alot gets a lot done.
Alot of Doing is a very productive alot.
What is either of these 2 archaic sounding things you speak of?
As long as you have paging space — and you almost certainly do — in general, an OS should page out pages of memory used by software that isn’t being frequently used.
It’s possible that the program is allocating memory and then keeps hammering it to keep it resident, but most of the time, a program allocating more memory than it absolutely requires isn’t honestly that big a deal, because the OS will handle it reasonably and just leave it in the pagefile.
I don’t know what the mechanism is to report this on Windows, but you might try looking in mmc (Windows-R mmc Enter), if that’s still a thing in Windows 11, as it has a bunch of process resource usage graphs.
On Linux, you’ll probably want to be looking at RSS to find what’s actually in physical memory (well, there can be shared memory and some other things, but RSS is probably a reasonably approximation). You can see this in
top.searches
If this is current, Windows probably calls it “Working Set”.
The problem with electron apps is that it’s not unused or infrequently used memory
