As a normal, boring user that does nothing special other than browse the internet and the occasional "casual coding" -- what am I supposed to do with 32GiB of ram?
Title. Besides setting tmpfs to use 10GiB of it to store downloads.
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)
I recently upgraded my RAM because it was wild how much was being used. I have to eat the cost of more RAM because sites don’t seem to minimize it at all.
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…
A program that can run on 1GB but uses 2GB is more wasteful, OS and FS level caching and memory reclamation only work if the memory is available, and a program wasting it takes it from everything else, unused RAM is wasted, but so is RAM being used for no actual function.
Not to say programs cant use large amounts, but they should provide a level of functionality for the amount of memory used, and some programs of late have been more than a bit inefficient, in short, filling the RAM is good, but do make sure its actually being used.
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.
I second that, install cockpit if you don’t want to bother with the CLI and run a couple of VMs. You can even start 3 VMs and install Kubernetes on them and play with it.
jokes aside, you’re getting benefits from more caching into ram, and you’re also getting the ability to not have to even think about your ram usage, even if the ram isn’t actively being used by apps you’re getting good use just from having it available, the OS has more wiggle room to use it optimally: I have 64GB of ram and regularly use only about 12-20GB of it, currently 6.1GB is being used as cache
Some apps like Okular (pdf viewer) can be configured to use more ram in the settings, you can set it to be very aggressive about preloading pages so that everything loads faster, set a very high amount of scrollback in your terminal if wanted, etc
I’ve never done this so I can’t speak to how much benefit there is from it, but you can set up a way to preload/cache your most used apps into ram, so that they’re always fully loaded and ready to go
“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.
LSPs, linters, AI auto complete, multiple ranked auto complete sources, contextual syntax highlighting abused to feed things like symbol tree views, type analysis, scoped file trees depending on what you’re working on, infinite undo since last commit, and all available in real-time.
I feel like I use up 8GB the moment I type “neovim” on a sufficiently large node project, lol.
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?”
A supercar is like having a fast CPU. I still want it so I can go zoom zoom. Having more RAM is like having more seats in your car. Pointless most of the time but occasionally very useful.
Only two things. Rust is 12 gigs on disk(which translates into 12 gigs of ram if you use tmpfs) and IDK how much in ram. Chromium is about same. Keep rest of ram for linker.
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
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