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GustavoM @lemmy.world

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.

55 comments

  • 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.

    • I have 64GB as future proofing (ITX board, two slots, can't address any more). Normally I probably use 8 to 10 of those doing things like gaming and hoarding internet tabs like they're a nonrenewable resource. I actually managed to crash my machine with an out of memory condition compiling something a while back. I don't remember what and I'm sure it doesn't count as regular use but I installed ZRAM to prevent it from happening again.

  • Use it for caching more stuff to make your system even faster, virtualization and most importantly, browsers

  • Compile chromium, firefox or rust

    • At the same time

      • 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.

  • 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.

55 comments