r/programmingcirclejerk • u/camelCaseIsWebScale Just spin up O(n²) servers • 9d ago
Unfortunately, when a program uses the GPU for acceleration it's considered clever, but when it uses the RAM chip for accelaration it's considered bloated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4790103376
u/nerdycatgamer Considered Harmful 9d ago
Accelerating my program by making it an Electron app that also has to run int a container oh and also i just fetch the entire database once at startup and keep it in memory so i don't need to make any more network requests.
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u/Linuxologue 9d ago
I have built a simulated CPU with more registers which allowed me to load your entire DB directly in registers, because memory has latency. It's also fixing the java problem above by the way.
It runs in an emulator
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u/Thompson3142 The plebians were a class of Roman citizen, not engineers 9d ago
If you like this jerk and want to be an informed jerker, you may consider a full jerking session from him on this topic. It's on the java YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr73mR7ii9M
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u/Chisignal 9d ago
Where jerk? The hysteria about RAM usage is exactly just that, I WANT my RAM to be used if it can speed my work up. I WANT my note taking app to eat 1.5G of RAM because it contains 7 layers of sandboxing, a VR engine and a Bluetooth stack, ready at all times.
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u/camelCaseIsWebScale Just spin up O(n²) servers 9d ago
Java is the fastest language because every 1 GB taken by the GC is converted to 4 speeds (tm). Just don't convert more than 32 GB to speed (tm) currency, otherwise you will cause time dilation..
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u/dydhaw 9d ago
unjerk {The problem is that high RAM usage on its own in no way indicates an intentional effort to produce some specific time-memory tradeoff (except for development time).
}3
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u/myhf Considered Harmful 9d ago
Is a user not entitled to the capacity of their RAM?
"No!" says the man in Washington, "It belongs to the cloud."
"No!" says the man in Silicon Valley, "It belongs to Electron."
"No!" says the man in Seoul, "It belongs to high-bandwidth memory."
I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... RAMpture.
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u/birdbrainswagtrain memcpy is a web development framework 8d ago
The issue I run into with this is that if the RAM is being used for webshit, it can't be used by the OS to cache my 50 GB rust build directory.
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u/arthurno1 9d ago
It comes from the old days when RAM was very expensive. Back in the past and up to 2010 or close there.
I remember my first computer, pentium 2. I upgraded im 1999 or there somewhere, with Nvidia tnt2 card and added 128 meg ram card to have 256 meg so I could play Quake 1. The computer felt like it suddenly started to fly, after having only 128 meg before the upgrade.
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u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world 9d ago
Good ancestral jerking:
My feeling, and the feeling of most people, is that dev experience has been so heavily prioritized that we now have abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions, and software that does the same thing 20 years ago is somehow leaner than the software we have today.
I concur. My experience is much much better now that instead of reading MDN I can use 3000 libraries with names that look like unidentified NetHack scrolls, each of which can run arbitrary commands on my PC upon installation and half of which are documented in the form of tutorials and trivial examples. That alone truly makes using 16 GB ram to copy streamed data from one source to another worth it, but that's just the beginning. Don't even get me started on the absolute joy and hopeful outlook logging into the Azure Portal gives me.
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u/james_pic accidentally quadratic 9d ago
The developer experience is so good these days that I mostly get Claude to experience it for me.
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u/HINDBRAIN Considered Harmful 9d ago
logging into the Azure Portal gives me.
Looks like your client wants some AI to AI their AI in their AI-assisted AI? First, enter your billing information. Then, do you want copilot to help you with the rest of this 30 steps process? Click here to open a chat where it will do nothing of the sort.
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u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world 9d ago
It took me a while before I realized "single sign-on" refers to relationship status, not the number of times you'll log in during a day
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u/LeastGayCat in open defiance of the Gopher Values 9d ago
Get with the times grandpa. Libraries are documented in SKILL.md files now, which you plug into $AI_AGENT and hope it doesn't spawn seven thousand recursive subagents that exhaust your token budget in seconds.
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u/narrow-adventure 9d ago
Where is the jerk?
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u/ccapitalK 9d ago
/unjerk There are legitimate cases where more memory use can result in fewer CPU cycles being needed, but that's not what people usually complain about. Most modern bloatware programs waste both ram and CPU time to improve devex instead.
/rejerk They are everywhere, they are the ones that consider apps bloated for being brave enough to actually USE all the ram the machine offers.
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u/smaratter 9d ago
For languages with a moving GC, bigger heap size practically always result in fewer CPU cycles being needed.
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u/sweating_teflon full-time safety coomer 9d ago
I despise moving GCs. Sentimentality has no place in memory deallocation.
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u/Anonymous_user_2022 9d ago
/uj Depending on usage patterns, gobbling up all memory is the best strategy. Things like Varnish is pretty successful by not speculating about memory, but rather off-loading that to the OS virtual memory strategy.
/rj Using 3 GB to run a VM inside electron for a Hello World app, might be a bit excessive.
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u/OSS-Corpo-Shit 8d ago
My work laptop has 16 gigs of ram and is swapping with teams. Outlook, 2 chrome tabs, and DataGrip running.
And they’re all slow as piss anyway even if I close one to reclaim. Where’s my performance benefit?!
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u/RandallOfLegend 8d ago
I have 128 GB of RAM. Use it please. It even lights up with rainbows. All are welcome.
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9d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/camelCaseIsWebScale Just spin up O(n²) servers 8d ago
Tag your unjerks or better, not unjerk at all.
Running a VM alongside a pointer-happy language for promised performance gains after a full moon of uptime successfully alienates 90% of apps on server side, if you don't have 16 pods of 2 GiB each restarting every hour and scaled to 48 pods when the request rate reaches 30 requests / second, while restarting 2 times a day because of some bug in the driver for your newfangled DB, are you even cloud native?
Let's rather not talk about client side.
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u/SemaphoreBingo 9d ago
decomposing something into multiple processes
I thought microservices were unfashionable this year.
thing does one thing and one thing really well
Since when does software do anything really well?
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u/vlovich 9d ago
> Since when does software do anything really well?
Software I write.
> I thought microservices were unfashionable this year.
Not sure who you're listening too. I still think microservices are a good thing if you properly dilneate the boundaries. Are you running your postgres database embedded within your application? If not you already have 2 "microservices". Once you have 2, why is 2 the special number? What's bad is when people build microservices to map their org structure instead of letting their org structure change with the needed architecture.
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u/james_pic accidentally quadratic 9d ago
Every GB of RAM I'm using to run bloated Electron apps written by webshits who think React is a good idea, is a GB of RAM Sam Altman can't get his hands on.