I've just revived an old desktop computer today. Turns out that it was running Windows XP, Avast free antivirus, and had Bearshare as a default search engine (in other words, that thing is NOT going to be connected to my network).

But, it also had Chrome installed. So I thought to myself, with 1.25GB of RAM, there's no way that it could run Chrome smoothly. Opened it, and....

It consumed 80MB of RAM. 80 MEGABYTES. And that's not even a clean installation of it, it's a (likely) malware-infested one from a user! Compare that to the Chrome of today.

again

this isn't something that happens nowadays because all y'all fuckers have 35 billion tabs open, 300 addons and countless handlers and allowed notifs

with a clean install, like 5 tabs, a handful of addons and no handlers/notifs added... you get like 25-50MB of RAM usage.

y o u r f a u l t

Unused ram is wasted ram

@irene Firefox isn’t much better in terms of ram usage

@kurast the standard excuse to just waste as much as possible.

@devs

I'll let firefox eat my RAM atleast

What free antivirus do you recommend then?

@hopsinat A brain.

@hopsinat other than that, probably MBAM if you don't need realtime (usually you don't if you scan everything before running it)

@Parzi Clean install of Chrome with 5 tabs open already consumes half a gig of RAM. My fault?

@kurast I strongly disagree. Developers should start to realize that their process isn't the only one that is running on the system. Or that there may be several instances of your process on the system. Good code is small and efficient, and consumes only as much RAM as it really needs.
Additionally, the unused RAM that is "wasted" is often used for caching, which so happens to be pretty much what it was designed for in the first place.

Also, Bryan Lunduke recently made an excellent video about this.
https://youtube.com/watch/...

Case in point, some of the processes running on my system right now:
DevRant UWP: ~65MB RAM.
Telegram Desktop: ~162MB RAM (much more than usual, might've sprung a leak).
WSL Ubuntu: 6.7MB of RAM (for 3 instances of it).

And you know what? All 3 of them are pretty darn responsive. As for the Chrome browser on that Windows XP machine? If it wasn't old, unmaintained and probably full of well-known security issues by now, I could really see myself using it. There's no reason whatsoever for web browsers to be this bloated. It's not because there are 70 jigawatts of memory in an average system today (and remember, there are laptops out there even today that only have as little as 2GB, soldered in and thus not upgradable), that a handful of applications should be gobbling it all up. And it's getting worse.. a lot, and it's happening much faster than I'm comfortable with. Especially considering that - as shown by that Windows XP machine - it used to be decent.

@Condor yup. I posted a screenshot of my actual RAM usage and it was slammed as a fake.

devRant users seem to not know what they're doing when doing a lot of things. Plenty of "windows updates suck dick uuuugggghhhh why does it take 8 hours" posts when it takes *maybe* 30 minutes for every computer I've ever set up on default settings, as well.

y'all fuckers gotta learn how to configure shit properly

@Parzi It so happens that I have just installed Chrome Canary (as I use Chrome stable as a daily driver and you wanted a clean install of it, right?) and made some screenshots of it.

https://nixmagic.com/pics/... shows you a clean installation of Chrome Canary with 5 tabs open and no extensions. https://nixmagic.com/pics/... shows you its RAM consumption.

Finally, I'd like to point out that personally I'd think twice before telling a sysadmin whose entire job pretty much consists of configuration that "y'all fuckers gotta learn how to configure shit properly".

@Condor i can't find my original post here with the task manager screenshot, maybe you can?

Also, on the topic of me saying dR members can't configure things:

Yes, yes, most of you use Arch so config never stops. However, finding the right config that'll work well for years is more important than constant tweaks.
Yes, yes, most of you do tech management. My dad does, so do I (to an admittedly limited degree as i'm not managing a business) so I do have at least some semblance of what i'm talking about.
My dad did manage an entire county's IT needs for a few years, and most all his knowledge was passed on to me from a very early age, so i've had plenty of time to build off that on my own and perfect quite a few of his practices.
AND I do have around 10 years' experience in running circles around sysadmins because they couldn't configure shit right, so there's that too.

so if it's about experience and knowledge I have plenty. And yes, a lot of people miss a lot of things.

@Parzi In an argument it's your own job to find the resources to back up your own claims. Not gonna spend time on supporting claims which I'm confident are wrong - unless you too are using a version of Chrome from about a decade ago, just like this Windows XP user did.

I'll be honest with you - I used to be an Arch user but not anymore. Aside from the fact that Arch users usually aren't sysadmins, and that sysadmins usually don't use Arch... I nowadays find the average Arch user quite cringey even. "You don't use Arch, you don't know Linux", "Arch Wiki is holy, a one stop shop!" (where's my kernel configs), and such. "Our way or the highway".

As a sysadmin I do agree that there are a ton of people that don't configure their servers right. Most of them have a developer background instead of a sysadmin one for some reason...

Having a parent who works in IT is pretty cool! Although I'm fairly skeptical about him being in charge for the entire IT needs of an entire country... I've got some friends at hosting companies like Digital Ocean who manage ~20k servers, but they aren't solely responsible for it, nor are they responsible for an entire country's IT needs.

@Condor This is true. I can't find it though, and I don't remember deleting it...

Yeah, this is also true, a lot of sysadmins don't use Arch, but we were on the topic of configs, and configuration never stops with Arch.

I mainly end up able to do what I do because some sysadmin got lazy and went "let's just let all users R/W to all users' active directories, no one here knows how to use the Up button" (this is a specific scenario my school had. Reported the issue, and they did nothing.)

COUNTY, not COUNTRY. States in the US are divided into counties so local gov't offices, schools, etc. can be placed and operate within defined bounds. The higher the population density (when they made all the counties), the smaller the county. Our county at the time was actually pretty huge, but that's due to lower population density. He fixed toll booths and other local gov't fixtures, managed every businesses' IT needs and replacement box/part needs, wired CAT3/4 entire buildings
1/2

(i don't remember when this was so it may have been CAT3 or 4, possibly even 5 towards the end.)

He was eventually replaced by some kid who drove the business into the ground within a year and they now only sell typewriters and office supplies.

@Parzi I personally can tell you that chrome cannot use 50MB of RAM for 5 tabs even with extentions disabled because it needs a 64 megabyte of vmemory space for each sandbox, same goes for Firefox nowadays.

Yeah, people don't know how to configure shit and I saw almost everyone using Linux with some default swappiness of 60 while it is far from the recommended one,it is just life.

Arch Linux is a refuge for elitists people that just want to be the cool kids, same goes for lots of other niches.

If I am to say why you are full of shit I would say: "you could always have made another screenshot". There is not better observation than a reproducible one

@QCat it was taken from my desktop. I'm away from home building a house.

@Parzi I'm completely lost at how a technical person who's got 10 years of experience in running circles around sysadmins finds himself at a construction site...

@Condor family house on family land, and prep to move the trailer we currently live in down here too to live in while we build it

trust me, not my first choice to move to the middle of buttfuck nowhere but i have to for college as i can't afford my own place and am doing online classes

@Condor this is with 2 open tabs and one file downloading (stalled at the moment of capture xD)