Opinion: Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it
readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies.
Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage. As memory prices continue to rise, it is time engineers reconsidered their applications and toolchains' voracious appetite for memory. Does a simple web page really need megabytes to show a user the modern equivalent of Hello World? Today's Windows Task Manager executable occupies 6 MB of disk space. It demands almost 70 MB before it will show a user just how much of a memory hog Chrome is these days.Those who remember effective software running in kilobytes rather than gigabytes he long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering. But as tech progress marched on and memory densities seemed destined to increase without end, protesting about bloat felt a lot like"old man yells at cloud."in recent months and currently show no signs of returning to levels where a developer could shrug and bolt on another multi-megabyte framework to meet an arbitrary user requirement.Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roofMemory boom-bust cycle booms again as Samsung reportedly jacks memory prices 60% Developers should consider precisely how much of a framework they really need and devote effort to efficiency. Managers must ensure they also he the space to do so. The energy spent securing a toolchain should go into checking its efficiency too. It is often joked that the memory and computing power that enabled humans to land on the Moon compare poorly to those of a modern smartphone. However, it is not so very long ago that perfectly usable applications and operating systems ran from floppy disks on devices with RAM measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes. Reversing decades of application growth will not happen overnight. It requires a change of thinking and a different outlook. Toolchains must be rethought, and rewards should be given for compactness, both at rest and in operation. In the 1970s, a shortage of energy spurred efficiency. In the 2020s, a shortage of computer memory might finally result in software that doesn't fill every byte with needless fluff. ®Bring complexity under control with enterprise-grade Kubernetes No, it'll probably never be a doddle – but you don't he to take the hard way when deploying Kubernetes, says NutanixFrance’s post office partly offline for over 12 hours after 'major network incident'Palo Alto's new Google Cloud deal boosts AI integration, could se on cloud costs
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RAM costs are rising and we’ll be the ones paying for itPaul is a digital expert. In the 20 years since he graduated with a first-class honours degree in Computer Science, Paul has been actively involved in a variety of different tech and creative industries that make him the go-to guy for reviews, opinion pieces, and featured articles. Read more »
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