Brkdncr comments on Microsoft just deleted Windows 11's 32GB RAM recommendation docs, as prices soar and it rushes to sell 8GB RAM PCs

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago (31 children)

32? It takes a lot to not only use 16, but to actively use it and be affected by slower pagefile access.

[–] toofpic@lemmy.world 26 points 3 months ago (10 children)

What? FF with a bunch of Jira tabs, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Miro, Spotify, and I am at 100% of 16 gigs. Not even saying anything about running a 8gig VM from time to time

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[–] Dojan@pawb.social 15 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Teams, Firefox, and Outlook and that’s most of my Windows work PC RAM gone. Have to close out of my dev work whenever a meeting is afoot because the calls fucking hammer this thing.

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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 8 points 3 months ago (4 children)

That's because Teams is a piece of shit, not because 16GB isn't enough normally.

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[–] Dojan@pawb.social 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

16gb will go far on MacOS and any Linux distro you throw at it. Windows 11 will struggle.

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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

Windows doesn't struggle with 16GB at all unless you're doing something that obviously needs as much memory as you can give it, like anything made by Adobe.

For 9/10 users 16GB is plenty, even with common apps that hoard it like it's some sort of hard drug (Chrome).

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[–] Dojan@pawb.social 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

I’m sitting at 22 gigs used with a browser, teams, and an IDE. The browser is taking about 1.6, the IDE as well. Teams is taking 2. Then there’s a bunch of little web views and other BS that windows has spawned gobbling up it all.

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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 1 point 3 months ago

Ah yes, the same crap about what's being "used" without the entire system context being considered. Because as we all know, simple numbers tell the entire story all by themselves.

The system and apps will use what's available if you have it. That's what you want, unused RAM is wasted RAM, and there is zero reason not to use resources that are readily available. The system automatically caches and preloads things like files and applications you tend to use at certain times of the day so they load faster when you do access them. This is used memory, but it is also readily available for literally anything else.

All of those apps know you have plenty more memory readily available if they want it, so they will fill to use whatever they want and won't attempt to do more than basic memory management. Once the active resource usage fills, both apps and the system itself will begin more aggressive memory management. Until then, there's no reason to.

Remove RAM until you have 16GB, run those exact same things and you will almost certainly see under 16GB of usage.

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[–] zikzak025@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

Teams is the most performance inefficient shit I've ever been forced to use.

We use both Zoom and Teams for meeting with partners. On my piece of shit work laptop, I have no problem with Zoom. Teams on the other hand will randomly cut my audio, lag my cursor, or cause peripherals to stop working when I'm in a meeting. I simply can't fathom how it's as bad as it is.

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[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

How much is your page being used? That’s a more real indicator. You should want all of your ram to be used.

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[–] toofpic@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

When it's being used, stuff gets slower - so yes, I technically use it as an indicator, by noticing that my machine is slow because it's out of free ram

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[–] PRIMEcavitationfetishist 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

No. No I can play games on Linux without capping my 16.

Edit: yes I checked page file use, dip-ass. Not counting GPU ram.

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[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (19 children)

Ehh, my main machine eats up 12-16GB with just background tasks, and that's on W10. Nobody gives a fuck about optimization since the late 00s.

E: just woke up my system

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[–] zarathustrad@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Well, I'm installing Linux (CachyOS) on my former W10 PC this weekend. So, my 16gb of ram will be well utilized.

At least someone still cares about optimization.

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[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

And CachyOS running KDE Plasma is the most RAM hungry setup. I took a Win 11 laptop with 8gb and threw Debian running Xfce and that's using like 300mb of RAM lol

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[–] zarathustrad@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

I guess going from 7-8 to 600-1.2k seemed like such an improvement I didn't think to GO HARDER to 300. Though my Ubuntu server VMs get that I assume lol.

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[–] blah3166@piefed.social 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

My Linux system (which used to run Window so it has 32 GB of RAM), won't even hit 8 GB if I'm not gaming. I've opened up multiple apps just to show how efficient it is. I think it was sitting around 4 GB before I started running things to see if I can make it balloon easily.

And I'm running most my apps as flatpaks which I've heard may add some slight overhead in terms of RAM usage - someone correct me if I'm wrong about this.

My work computer (granted it likely has tons of background security tools running) uses 10/16 GB's just to get to the desktop and do nothing. The best part is, because ~1.2 GB's of RAM gets allocated for the integrated graphics, I'm really only left with ~4.8 GB's of RAM to do actual work. But wait, it gets even better! This week I found out some bullshit Copilot feature was enabled and taking up another ~1.2 GB's of RAM, leaving me with a total of 3.6 GB's of RAM. So I disabled the WSAIFabricSvc service and reclaimed a sliver of dignity and work space.

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[–] addie@feddit.uk 1 point 3 months ago

Flatpaks bring all their own libraries with them rather than using the system ones.

(plus) you avoid dependency hell, apps "just work"
(minus) centralised version updates are less effective for bug and security fixes; all flatpaks must be updated separately
(minus) all flatpak apps take additional disk space since they bring everything with them
(minus) all flatpak apps take additional memory; Linux can't keep a single copy of a library read-only in memory if multiple apps are using it

I think they have their place for apps that are under very heavy development, or for apps which are extremely "resource heavy" in comparison to the system resources that they use (by which I mean, games). I wouldn't want my bread-and-butter system utilities to be flatpaks.

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[–] Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

SysMain / Superfetch has altered your perception of how much RAM you actually use.

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[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

I haven't heard of that since the Vista days, totally forgot about it. Doesn't make sense, I've been all-flash* (E is still HDD for backups, no programs) for well-over a decade. Maybe I should disable it and see if it makes a difference. C is a Samsung 960 Pro and D is a Western Digital Black SN750 in raid0, so it's not really helping even if it is doing something...

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[–] Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

The alternative is your CPU spooling up and a longer delay launching applications.

In your screenshot, you already have 70% available memory. Are you on a quest to maximize idle ram? If so, why?

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[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 point 3 months ago

Shortly after I took the screenshot I fired up Motor Town for a couple hours; when I closed it, the usage settled on 27GB. Like, sure, I have oodles of ram, but why. What does windows anticipate me doing, launching the game multiple times in rapid succession? The game is only like 3GB if I remember right, wtf is it doing that is using 19 + 8 additional gigs on? It's like this black box that's all 'trust me bro' but there's no logic to it. Opaque is the term I want, I believe.

It's been bugging me for a while, just sort of venting. Especially at a restart, I haven't launched anything beyond startup programs. Why is it trying to guess what I might do? If I launch something, close it, sure, keep it in ram for a couple minutes. But don't hold onto it like a hoarder, lol.

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[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Ram usage isn’t important, it’s how much your page being hit. Otherwise you want your ram fully utilized.

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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 7 points 3 months ago

The number of people that still don't understand this, even after it's been discussed ad nauseum for decades is frightening.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. You want it used. You want cached data there for instant access. What matters is how much is available for something else if you need it, and Windows does a shit job of getting that info across.

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[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

I'm pretty sure I have the pagefile disabled; both C and D are NVMe drives, and D is raid0. I disabled superfetch a few minutes ago, rebooted, and don't see any performance impact, but the used memory when idle is now 10GB, vs the 19 in that screenshot. No other changes.

I could see the appeal if I was using a platter drive for my programs or frequent data, but it's not 2008 anymore. I'd rather see actual usage over 'the computer knows best'.

E: me spell good

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[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

You shouldn’t disable page.

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[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

I don't anticipate needing all 64 gigs at once, and afaik the only other reason is for bsod diagnostics. Unless there is something I am unaware of...?

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[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Hibernate?

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[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 point 3 months ago

Not on this machine, though I use it for one of my laptops. But that system also has the pagefile disabled if I remember correctly, as it has 48 gigs.

(that unit has a buggy gpu that fails to resume from sleep and just gives static instead; windows and linux. So hibernate is the solution for 'sleeping'.)

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