How does chrome take 4 gb of ram? That is like 5 full movies.
In: Technology
Speaking about the computer industry in general there has always been a balance between the cost of development time vs the price of hardware.
Back in the 80’s and early 90’s RAM was extremely expensive. A reasonable computer might only have a few kilobytes of RAM, up to several megabytes by the mid 90’s. The cost of storage (hard drives) has always been an order of magnitude cheaper.
To make software fit on a computer developers had to be very clever in finding ways to maintain efficiency in the code. Using what little RAM they had as effectively as possible.
Come the 2000’s and suddenly the paradigm shifted completely in the other direction. Computers now have several GB of RAM as standard so developers now spend more time on features and performance vs efficiency.
Computer programs today are also orders of magnitude more complex than in the 80’s. A developer axiom is “computer programmers are lazy”. What’s meant by that is don’t re-invent the wheel, if someone already made a wheel use that instead and save yourself some time. Pre-written code is called a library, instead of having to write code to perform a common function you can instead use code in a library to do it instead. But these libraries are often quite large when you only require 1 small part, or they weren’t particularly efficient in the first place. So developers have a tendency of loading all of these libraries in memory just in case they need one.
– The more you can load in RAM, the faster the browser will be. Every time you have to pull something from the hard drive it slows down your computer significantly
– Websites and browsers have massive inefficiencies in them. Memory leaks, extra libraries, redundant processes, and other crap that fills up RAM with time. Chrome doesn’t control what code is on a particular website either, that’s fault of that websites developer.
– Developer teams can’t be bothered to make it better because there isn’t enough time, current industry focus is on new features (more profits) rather than making existing code better.
– Extensive debugging time these days is more likely to be spent plugging security holes (playing security whack-a-mole) than making the underlying code better.
– Many Web developers are fundamentally multimedia experts and graphic designers. Many are self taught, most don’t have high end computer science degrees. This means that have very little understand of the underlying processes on a computer and make “pretty stuff that works” rather than “stuff that works extremely well”
– More often than not it’s “easier” to leave unnecessary libraries and crap in RAM in case you need it later, even if you aren’t using it now. RAM is too cheap these days for developers to care that much.
– Extra plugins and add-ons for your browser add to it’s workload, and they aren’t always super efficient at it.
– Computers these days rely heavily on computer languages like Java, PhP, HTML, C#, etc that don’t run code directly to the OS but instead run through an interpreter like the web browser. This has the advantage of making code multi-platform in that it will run as easily on PC as Mac or mobile devices. The problem with that is that they are inherently inefficient as a result because they add all these extra layers ontop of the OS to run. This in turn leads to more performance loss, and even sloppier code.
In my own opinion the industry has taken a really wrong turn in the past 10 years and hasn’t learned from its mistakes yet. The price we paid for adding under-powered and oversimplified mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) to our ecosystem is everything is now bloated, inefficient, and runs like crap.
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