this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
340 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
85873 readers
3881 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well why would they prioritize memory constraints? It has literally no change to their bottom line.
Say you're paying an engineer 100k a year. Reasonable cost in a western country, US based would be more like 200k+ when taxes and everything are involved. Tell him to spend 20% of his time optimizing memory usage.
Now how much money are you spending to increase your userbase by maybe 0.01% (there can't be that many people who'd uninstall software they need just because it uses more RAM than they'd like)? And that's for every engineer you tell to spend time optimizing.
Memory consumption only becomes important to the authors of the software when it's on the backend and you're serving so many users that your annual server costs get into millions, at which point you can save enough money that optimization is starting to be worth it.
It sucks, but it is what it is. For everyone to start building super optimized software again, we'd all first have to move to 512 MB Pentium 4 machines so using more memory would actually mean lost revenue via lost customers.