The Verge reviewed the latest Surface Laptop, which only comes with 8GB of RAM at a higher price than the previous 16GB model, and they conclude that Windows isn’t really usable on 8GB of RAM. Whether that’s true or not I do not know – I would assume it depends a lot on your usage – but this quote from the review I found quite peculiar:
I was on a Microsoft Teams call (using the app, not a browser) when the host streamed a brief video, which made the whole laptop hang for several seconds. At the time, I had about 10 Chrome tabs open across two desktops, alongside Slack and Signal — not an obscene level of multitasking.
↫ Antonio G. Di Benedetto at The Verge
Excuse me, but that is actually an obscene level of multitasking because every single one of those “applications” is a complete Chrome browser. Just in the paragraph above, there’s four individual complete Chrome browsers running, with little to no optimisation. Why would anyone be surprised this scenario strains a mere 8GB of RAM? This isn’t merely a Windows problem; this is a programmers choosing suboptimal tooling × managers have no idea what they’re doing problem.
If Teams, Slack, and Signal had been proper, native applications instead of websites running in terrible frameworks, Windows 11 would have handled this scenario just fine.
The only silver lining to the RAM supply crisis might be it forces developers away from these bloated frameworks.
sloth,
I made a similar case that the steam machine not having better specs could have a silver lining: it could influence game developers to target lesser specs. But the fundamental assumption is that machines afflicted with lesser ram must carry enough weight to actually “penalize” publishers that don’t support them well. I’m not sure that’s the case for windows computers. Steam survey may not be completely representative, but regardless they have the vast majority of computers at 16GB system RAM or more. Realistically the 8% of the market with 8GB RAM may not be that compelling of a target.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/En
Software publishers are notoriously uninterested in optimizing, especially when those impacted are just a small minority.
Alfman,
I’m not sure what happened. My wife had a 4GB Lenovo laptop for years, until the hardware gave up. Despite my constant skepticism, Windows 10 actually worked okay on it.
Everyday web browsing, word, excel, and that kind of stuff. Basically what we used to do on Windows XP back in the day, sans gaming.
This was not too long ago. The 8GB should be more than enough, unless one does heavy gaming, content creation, or similar.
Its as Thom says, these programs are now disproportionatly just one use web browsers. I dont run any of those sorts of provrams and my linux laptop with 4 gigs of ram works fine for doing my office work on. My 8 gig laptop also running linux handles pretty much anything not gaming fine. But the moment you have to run a whole 4 web browsers at a time for your 4 programs its going to run like arse because all modern web browsers are resource hogs in the extreme
If they had been websites running as tabs within the normal browser, instead of running their own totally separate browser engine they would have used significantly less memory too.
Not sure how that would be doable…
Even tabs within the same browser instance should be sandboxed and this alone eats tons of mem. It would require, lets say, your Teams binary to have visibility to the browser process, etc
Then again, for Teams and Office, I already run them from within browser tabs. Since Teams became a webapp, theres no point in running the standalone version, for example.
Thing is, such a use does not strain the MacBook Neo, so whatever Apple is doing, it’s working much better than what Microsoft is doing.
Lest we forget, it’s not just 8GB, it’s 8GB plus swapping to a high-quality SSD. This is not 2006 anymore, when your RAM was your limit (because swapping happened to a slow 5400RPM hard drive).
So, either Windows 11 uses too much RAM just for itself (leaving too little unswapped address space for applications), or it doesn’t do memory management and swapping as well as MacOS. In either case, Windows 11 needs to do better.
kurkosdr,
I wondered about that too. The article shows the following SSD speeds (doing my best to format for in the limitations of wordpress).
I agree with the author, I don’t like having so little RAM the system swaps under modest loads, however the tasks mentioned really should not have overwhelmed a system with 8GB RAM. It is normal for RAM become nearly full as it gets used for caching. This shouldn’t automatically be cause for alarm as long as the memory gets freed when more RAM is needed to avoid swapping.
It used to be that installing retail versions of windows gave us a lean and mean unbloated OS, but unfortunately this is not the case anymore. Microsoft have become more guilty than the OEMs ever were peddling bloatware. It wouldn’t surprise me if the real culprit is some damned microsoft background process. The RAM might be a red herring.
I disagree about the obscenity of this multitasking.
1) This is a machine that costs 30% more than a comparable APPLE product. At that price it should be able to stream video smoothly no matter what is happening the in the background.
2) A machine like this should have been tested against common use cases before being released to a reviewer. Having a web browser and a couple electron applications open while taking a Teams call is pretty vanilla.
3) As others have noted, a Mac with 8GB of RAM doesn’t have this problem. Electron is one problem but an OS that can’t manage memory effectively is a bigger one.
4) The issue here may not be the RAM. This Surface “features” an ARM CPU and Windows on ARM is a miserable experience no matter how much RAM you throw at it. If any of these applications were x86 applications running via whatever MS considers a compatibility layer, I’m surprised it only hung for ten seconds instead of catching on fire.
Brainworm,
This hadn’t occurred to me, but now that you say it I find it could plausibly explain the delay. It’s easy to see how starting a video stream will load new resources and the x86 emulator may have to recompile a lot of code when that happens. While the author clearly blamed the RAM, more testing may be needed.
At least upgrading RAM is an easy fix. Just swap a new SODIMM into that unsoldered RAM slot…
Oh nix that, that’s the old way. Upgrading hardware is passe, we’re in the future now!
I totally agree with you Thom.
Feels great.
“there’s four individual complete Chrome browsers running, with little to no optimisation”
My understanding is the Chrome EXE/DLL binary code is read only executable.
The operating system should be able to map 1 physical page of read only executable ram into 4 different process address spaces.
While there are 4 processes, there should be a significant amount of ram sharing. So the physical memory required would not be 4 times as much as 1 process.
If operating system is working correctly, the amount of ram used by 4 processes would be almost same as 1 process with 4 threads for each web page.
The OS has to be aware that the code is the same, usually this means shared libraries. If each instance comes with its own set of libraries and executables then no sharing goes on because the OS treats them as distinct files.
Linux has KSM (kernel samepage merging) which scans memory for identical pages and merges them which could partially mitigate this, but windows doesn’t have anything like this.
Of course the more the different versions of chrome diverge, the less pages will be identical anyway.