Eli5: What is RAM and why is it important for browsers?
In: Technology
In order to run code or load information like images/etc, that code/information needs to exist somewhere. RAM – Random Access Memory or just “Memory” in common usage is volatile (goes away when the computer powers down), very fast storage as opposed to a hard drive which is non-volatile but a lot slower.
If there were no RAM, you’d need to load every line of code on-demand from the broswer’s files that exist on the hard drive. Any website you visited would need to be downloaded to your hard drive and then read back from that hard drive on demand which would make for a ridiculously slow experience.
With RAM, the needed code from the browser is loaded from the hard drive into RAM when the browser starts so it’s ready in a much faster state on-demand. Any data from a website is downloaded into RAM (any cached files being then copied to the hard drive).
The more RAM you ahve, the more stuff you can store in it before it runs out and stuff needs to be run from the hard drive. Practically, programs are not written without basic levels of RAM in mind and will not operate correctly with insufficient RAM. For the most part though, it’s hard to find computers with less than 4GB of RAM anymore which is plenty for most basic computing.
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