Surviving The RAM Apocalypse With Software Optimizations

To the surprise of almost nobody, the unprecedented build-out of datacenters and the equipping of them with servers for so-called ‘AI’ has led to a massive shortage of certain components. With random access memory (RAM) being so far the most heavily affected and with storage in the form of HDDs and SSDs not far behind, this has led many to ask the question of how we will survive the coming months, years, decades, or however-long the current AI bubble will last. One thing is already certain, and that is that we will have to make our current computer systems last longer, and forego simply tossing in more sticks of RAM in favor of doing more with less. This is easy to imagine for those of us who remember running a full-blown Windows desktop system on a sub-GHz x86 system with less than a GB of RAM, but might require some adjustment for everyone else. In short, what can us software developers do differently to make a hundred MB of RAM stretch further, and make a GB of storage space look positively spacious again? Just What Happened? At the risk of coming across as an ‘in my day’ rant, around the year 2000 I was using an AMD Duron 600 system with probably about 256 MB of SDRAM that succeeded my previous Intel Celeron 400 system with an amazing 64 MB of SDRAM. With Windows 2000 (arguably still the best version of Windows) on its own roomy 1 GB HDD partition there was still plenty of room on the rest of the HDD for applications, documents and some multimedia content like music and videos. On these systems I could run a browser with many tabs open, alongside an office suite, an IDE, chat applications like IRC and ICQ, an email client, filesharing applications, and much more, without the system breaking a sweat. In the Duron 600 system I would eventually install a Matrox G550 AGP videocard to do some dual-monitor action, like watching videos or consulting documentation while browsing or programming at the same time. Fast-forward a few decades and you cannot even install Windows on a 1 GB partition, and it requires more RAM than that. A quick check on the Windows 10 system that I’m typing this on shows that currently the Windows folder is nearly 27 GB in size and just the Thunderbird email client is gobbling up over 150 MB of RAM by itself. Compare this to the minimum Windows 2000 system requirements of a Pentium 133 MHz, 32 MB of RAM and 1 GB of free HDD space. This raises the question of what the reason is for this increase, when that email client in the early 2000s had effectively the same features in a much smaller package, and Windows 2000 is effectively the same as Windows 7, 10 and now 11, at its core when it comes to its feature set. The same is true for ‘fast and light’ options like Linux, which I had...

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