Just curious about it, but can’t understand why is it like that.
In: 7
RAM is the thing that that CPU can directly access. When you run a program – a game, browser or other app, the instructions for that application are relatively small – maybe only a few megabytes in size. Most apps – games, browsers and so on, include many graphics, and/or access a lot of data (maybe a database, or retrieve data over the web). The data the program uses will dwarf the program.
For games, typically many gigabytes in size, all those animations and effects and backdrops – are individually stored. A person which is walking, may have hundreds of images to represent the walking motion, and the ‘game’ will just layer the right image to make up the display – like a glorified, old-style flip-book.
A web browser takes a small piece of information, like [http://google.com](http://google.com) and retrieves something from the website. In turn, that information has more links to other pieces of info – CSS/HTML/Javascript – so that the page looks good, has videos/images and adverts. This process repeats – many websites are composited from lots of different bits of information. The memory to store this can easily amount to hundreds of megabytes for one site. Much maybe shared, e.g. going to [newyorktimes.com](https://newyorktimes.com) and [reddit.com](https://reddit.com) may have bits which are similar. So the web browser stores this in a database, and ideally, the database needs to be in memory to make the application seem fast. (When a browser runs out of memory, the machine will now feel very sluggish).
Back in the days when everything was textual – a few MB of RAM was fine. Now we play huge games or open dozens/hundreds of tabs, the inefficiencies are piled up. Application or memory size isnt a good way to measure ‘goodness’ but it is annoying when apps grow and grow, and eventually your nice PC feels like it needs an upgrade.
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