16G is just enough that I only get two or three OOM kills a day. So, it's pathetically low for my usage, but I can't upgrade because it's all soldered on now! 64G or 128G seems like it would be enough to not run into problems.

What are you doing where you're having OOM kills? I think the only time that's ever happened to me on a desktop computer (or laptop) was when I accidentally generated an enormous mesh in Blender

Blender fun : Select All -> Subdivide -> Subdivide -> Subdivide ... wait where did all my memory go!

I have learnt the ways of vertices. Not great at making the model I want, but getting there.

As someone on a desktop with 64GB, firefox still manages to slowly rise in usage up to around 40% of RAM, occasionally causing oom issues.

I wonder if you have a runaway extension... I haven't seen this type of issue from Firefox in a while.

I also have 64GB on my home PC and Firefox tends to get into bad states where it uses up a lot of RAM/CPU too. Restarting it usually fixes things (with saved tabs so I don't lose too much state).

But outside of bugs I can see why we're not at 100GB - even with a PopOS VM soaking up 8GB and running Firefox for at least a day or two with maybe 30 tabs, I'm only at 21GB used. Most of that is Firefox and Edge.

yeah, its definitely a cache/extension thing; usually when it gets near the edge I also restart. I do wish there were a way to set a max cache size for firefox.

FF using 1GB here, after several hours. You must have a leak somewhere.

How many windows/tabs is a much more relevant question in my experience.

FF doesn't load old tabs so you can't just count them if they've been carried over since a restart.

true, active tabs matters, but people that have hundreds of tabs open but only rarely open new ones or touch old ones are probably also quite rare.

I open and close one or two times per day. Might have a dozen+ open at once, not a huge number.

I usually have 800 to 1000 tabs open and Firefox only uses a few GB.

128 GiB here. Still run into OOMs occasionally.

> Drawing a game at a decent framerate at 320x200 required careful coding.

320x200 is 64,000 pixels.

If you want to maintain 20 fps, then you have to render 1,280,000 pixels per second. At 40 Mhz, that's 31.25 clock cycles per pixel. And the IPC of a 386 was pretty awful.

That's also not including any CPU time for game logic.

Hint: you don't replace all pixels at once.

Most PC games of the VGA DOS era did exactly that, though.

But, well, a lot can be done in 30 cycles. If it's a 2D game, then you're mostly blitting sprites. If there's no need for translucency, each row can be reduced to a memcpy (i.e. probably REP MOVSD).

Something like Doom had to do a lot more tricks to be fast enough. Though even then it still repainted all the pixels.

You might enjoy the Fridman interview of Carmack. He talks about that era’s repaint strategies.

For most users that is true. I think there were several applications that drove the demand for more memory, then the 32bit -> 64bit transition drove it further but now for most users 16GB is plenty.

16 GB RAM is above average. I've just opened BestBuy (US, WA, and I'm not logged in so it picked some store in Seattle - YMMV), went to the "All Laptops" section (no filters of any kind) and here's what I get on the first page: 16, 8, 12, 8, 12, 4, 4, 4, 4, 8, 8, 8, 8, 16, 16, 4, 4, 8. Median value is obviously 8 and mean/average is 8.4.

I'd say that's about enough to comfortably use a browser with a few tabs on an otherwise pristine machine with nothing unusual running in background (and I'm not sure about memory requirements of all the typically prenistalled crapware). Start opening more tabs or install some apps and 8GB RAM is going to run out real quick.

And it goes as low as 4 - which is a bad joke. That's appropriate only for quite special low-memory uses (like a thin client, preferably based on a special low-resource GNU/Linux distro) or "I'll install my own RAM anyway so I don't care what comes stock" scenario.

I agree that 4 GiB is too low for browsers these days (and has been for years) but but that is only because the web is so bloated. But 4 GiB would also be a waste on any kind of thin client. Plenty of local applications should run fine on that with the appropriate OS.

Low end chromebooks have 4gb, but they pretty much count as thin clients. :)

I think it's really quite the opposite.

Compute resource consumption is like a gas, it expands to fill whatever container you give it.

Things didn't reach a comfortable level, Moore's Law just slowed down a lot so bloat slowed at pace. When developers can get a machine with twice as much resources every year and a half, things feel uncomfortable real quick for everybody else. When developer's can't ... things stop being so uncomfortable for everyone.

However, there is a certain amount of physical reality that has capped needs. Audio and video have limits to perceptual differences; with a given codec (which are getting better as well) there is a maximum bitrate where a human will be able to experience an improvement. Lots of arguing about where exactly, but the limit exists and so the need for storage/compute/memory to handle media has a max and we've hit that.