Memory

04/10/2023

From September 14th, 2013 until 03 17 today, my digital life was constrained to four gigabytes (4 GB) of single-channel memory. My 2021 budget smartphone has a similar configuration, putting my 2017 business-class laptop out of whack for a couple of years. It is still usable today, but becoming less viable following continuous evolutions to my computer activities.

Video authoring brought the most frustrations. In most projects, I had to save my work and reload Shotcut regularly to alleviate on memory before it leaks into swap space, if not constantly nagging about being low on memory, for which there was nothing else I could do other than to needlessly telling it to shut up.

Web development involves one or two browsers with development tools, and a source code editor. In addition, one browser may have extra tabs for looking up technical references on the Internet. VSCodium may be in place of my usual source code editors. From here, I could afford running a third test browser before leaking into swap space. Meanwhile, there are times when I would manually run a garbage collection to free up memory.

My digital life is archived with LZMA2 on 7-Zip’s Ultra preset. This consumes much of 4 GB, so nothing else was open to avoid leaking into swap space. Therefore, during archive operations, I would leave the computer and go do something else.

Several scholar instructions required me to use some application, often big. Miro is the worst offender: the online collaborative whiteboard platform with titanic canvases spreading over one gigabyte of memory. During group meetings, I had to close it before using Google Workspace. In fact, running two productivity web applications side-by-side without leaking into swap space is often impossible.

First, 4 GB can hold at most one big activity. Switching activities often required packing away stuffs relevant to the old to make way for the new. Second, I set up swap space to cushion malign behaviors such as memory leaks, and enable suspend to disk features. Relying on it for everyday activities is unhealthy; it wears on my disk for severe performance hits.

A memory upgrade is inexpensive, readily available, and future proof. The resulting dual-channel configuration should boost memory-intensive processes especially real-time graphics. But the main attraction is being able to enjoy the computational capacities others have lived with for so many years. While a memory upgrade enables me to leave all ongoing work open to write this post, I rather not develop (anymore) bad digital habits.

Still, I am perplexed on how people can have over eleven browser tabs open and live a normal life at the same time. Maybe it was memory after all.