[Linux-aus] contest proposal

[Russell Coker]

On Monday, 1 January 2024 15:18:14 AEDT Brendan Halley via linux-aus wrote:
> I've seen the issue of memory bloat discussed many times by lots of people,
> all with different priorities. The consensus at the end of the conversation
> is always why waste part of someone's life fixing the problem when memory
> is so cheap.

DDR sticks are cheap on ebay, but that's only a small portion of the issue.

Laptops with soldered RAM are common particularly in the cheap market segment 
and the light market segment.  My preferred laptop is the Thinkpad Carbon X1 
which comes with 8G soldered on (at moderate expense) or 16G soldered (at 
brutal expense).

I could afford a laptop with 16G of RAM due to having better than average 
knowledge of hardware allowing me to select a good option on ebay and get it 
cheaply repaired if it happens to not be as good as hoped.  The typical user 
would go to Officeworks and pay $250 for a laptop with 4G, $400 for one with 
8G, or $800 for one with 16G.

The cheap laptops advertised often have as little as 4G of RAM with no 
apparent option to upgrade.  I have not disassembled such laptops to see if 
that's really the case so I have to trust the specs.

For the laptops with socketed RAM the RAM in larger DIMM sizes is not cheap 
and even the large sizes aren't that large.  DDR3 SODIMMs on ebay seem to be 
only up to 8G in size, so a 2 socket DDR3 laptop can only have 16G - which 
still has performance problems now!

Windows 11 is incompatible with a lot of old hardware.  Linux running well on 
such older machines makes it a free software AND hardware option.  Even when 
RAM is relatively cheap and available (such as for older desktops) going from 
working with existing hardware to needing an upgrade is a significant cost 
increase.

Systems like the Raspberry Pi fill a market niche for low end workstations and 
there are a variety of other uses such as the cases that can make a Raspberry 
Pi into a laptop.  The maximum RAM available for a Raspberry Pi is 8G and the 
vast majority of devices shipped have 2G or less.

I believe that a phone connected to USB-C is a viable general purpose computer 
but one of the main issues is the fact that common devices like the 
PinePhonePro only have 4G of RAM.

> Is your idea focused on the current state of affairs or more worried about
> scaling issues in years to come if RAM prices increase/there aren't as many
> technical developments in that area?

Instead of raising this now when there's a large amount of hardware with 4G/8G 
suffering performance issues I could have raised it 9 years ago when it was 
hardware with 2G/4G or 18 years ago when it was hardware with 1G/2G.

If we don't do anything to address this issue now then we will eventually have 
16G or 32G systems having performance issues.

There are real uses for more RAM, using RAM can cache calculations or disk 
data to allow large RAM to compensate for storage or CPU bottlenecks.  But 
sometimes a better option is to rely on fast hardware instead of complex 
caching, for example the search algorithms used in old versions of kmail on 
typical modern laptop hardware would outperform what current versions of kmail 
do with a mysql database on older laptops that have spinning media.

-- 
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