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I don't know. "Eating up all my ram" seems perfectly acceptable to me at first glance. I purchase ram and use it in my computer for expressly this purpose: to improve the responsiveness and snappiness of programs.

Where do you draw the line at what's acceptable use of ram and what's not? I have 32G on my desktop, is it unacceptable that chrome is using 8G?



I think it's "inefficient use of RAM" that they're talking about.

If Firefox should conceivably run in 8GB, but ends up trying to use 33GB (in your case), that would obviously be bad.

Mozilla just targets efficiencies that include people with much, much less RAM than you for their baseline.


The question is how sensibly Chrome uses those 8 GB of RAM. We are very much still at the point where (most likely) not your entire hard drive + whatever data is generated on the fly or loaded from a webpage fits into your RAM. As such the often repeated statement that "unused RAM is wasted RAM" is still nonsense. There is always something which could be cached in RAM and would provide a speed-up of some form. If Chrome reserves 8 GB of that for itself, then it should utilize that in some form, so that it's used more sensibly than it could be used by other programs.

For example, Chrome could keep a hundred pages from your browsing history cached in RAM, so that when you go back, it loads that instantly. That is a speed-up, but you probably will never go back one hundred pages in a row. So, another program could almost certainly use the RAM more sensibly than Chrome, if that was the case.

And what Dotzler is referring to, is the worst kind of offense. If his promise holds true, Firefox's implementation will be just as good as Chrome's in terms of speed, but will use less RAM. Which would mean that Chrome is using some RAM without providing a speed-up, i.e. actually wasting that RAM. And that is always unacceptable.




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