But if you choose to run software that uses a lot of RAM, ask yourself why you haven’t created an alternative that doesn’t use a lot of RAM. If the answer is “I don’t have the time to”, then that’s probably also why the developer hasn’t made it use less RAM.
The answer to that question is that they’re either lazy, ignorant or both. :D
In all seriousness. I can imagine that a lot of developers who work on commercial products are given about 20% of the time and resources needed to make a good product. I don’t blame them for doing what it takes to not get fired.
It’s more likely they are not incentivized to. When you are writing software for a living, typically there days the companies you work for prioritize delivery speed over everything else. If they prioritized memory constraints, software would use less memory.
When you are rewarded for features and delivery, you end up with shit like electron. Not to even begin talking about how a whole generation of developers learned to code for the web and never touch os level dev…
Well why would they prioritize memory constraints? It has literally no change to their bottom line.
Say you’re paying an engineer 100k a year. Reasonable cost in a western country, US based would be more like 200k+ when taxes and everything are involved. Tell him to spend 20% of his time optimizing memory usage.
Now how much money are you spending to increase your userbase by maybe 0.01% (there can’t be that many people who’d uninstall software they need just because it uses more RAM than they’d like)? And that’s for every engineer you tell to spend time optimizing.
Memory consumption only becomes important to the authors of the software when it’s on the backend and you’re serving so many users that your annual server costs get into millions, at which point you can save enough money that optimization is starting to be worth it.
It sucks, but it is what it is. For everyone to start building super optimized software again, we’d all first have to move to 512 MB Pentium 4 machines so using more memory would actually mean lost revenue via lost customers.
Also true.
But if you choose to run software that uses a lot of RAM, ask yourself why you haven’t created an alternative that doesn’t use a lot of RAM. If the answer is “I don’t have the time to”, then that’s probably also why the developer hasn’t made it use less RAM.
The answer to that question is that they’re either lazy, ignorant or both. :D
In all seriousness. I can imagine that a lot of developers who work on commercial products are given about 20% of the time and resources needed to make a good product. I don’t blame them for doing what it takes to not get fired.
That’s why libre source software is so important!
Yeah turns out that RAM is cheap and dev time is expensive. Compared to what devs charge their employers in western countries, RAM is STILL cheap.
With libre software, your employer isn’t bleeding money for every day spent on optimization.
It’s more likely they are not incentivized to. When you are writing software for a living, typically there days the companies you work for prioritize delivery speed over everything else. If they prioritized memory constraints, software would use less memory.
When you are rewarded for features and delivery, you end up with shit like electron. Not to even begin talking about how a whole generation of developers learned to code for the web and never touch os level dev…
Well why would they prioritize memory constraints? It has literally no change to their bottom line.
Say you’re paying an engineer 100k a year. Reasonable cost in a western country, US based would be more like 200k+ when taxes and everything are involved. Tell him to spend 20% of his time optimizing memory usage.
Now how much money are you spending to increase your userbase by maybe 0.01% (there can’t be that many people who’d uninstall software they need just because it uses more RAM than they’d like)? And that’s for every engineer you tell to spend time optimizing.
Memory consumption only becomes important to the authors of the software when it’s on the backend and you’re serving so many users that your annual server costs get into millions, at which point you can save enough money that optimization is starting to be worth it.
It sucks, but it is what it is. For everyone to start building super optimized software again, we’d all first have to move to 512 MB Pentium 4 machines so using more memory would actually mean lost revenue via lost customers.