News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by denysvitali on Sunday March 29, 2026 @02:25PM (#47565730)
The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by nshelia on Sunday March 29, 2026 @02:41PM (#47565876)
We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by denysvitali on Sunday March 29, 2026 @02:43PM (#47565898)
A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by ozim on Sunday March 29, 2026 @03:56PM (#47566621)
Space is mostly empty there is not much interesting to collect and who’s going to buy that data

LinkedIn on the other hand user behavior, computer etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by bryanrasmussen on Monday March 30, 2026 @01:11AM (#47570593)
>Space is mostly empty

Yes, but Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by ozim on Monday March 30, 2026 @02:19AM (#47571001)
Exactly and people on LinkedIn think they are smarter than everyone and definitely smarter than dolphins, because what dolphins do? They muck in the water all day having good time whereas humans built important profiles on LinkedIn having good time berating each other.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by mattmanser on Sunday March 29, 2026 @02:59PM (#47566039)
As someone was pointing out in a thread the other day about memory usage, a lot is fonts and images.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by littlestymaar on Sunday March 29, 2026 @03:35PM (#47566434)
Aka poor resources management.

If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by ben-schaaf on Sunday March 29, 2026 @07:20PM (#47568493)
The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font, and you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal (not sure if they've fixed it yet).

Caching gryphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by littlestymaar on Monday March 30, 2026 @12:13AM (#47570322)
> The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font

No, because you have no reason to have more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least).

> you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.

I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above).

But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by ben-schaaf on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @12:02AM (#47582609)
> I didn't set the bar to 70kB

The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB, mattmanser then explained that images and fonts easily exceed that, and then you called that poor resource management. Sounds like we're on the same page here, but you seemed to have missed the context of the comment you initially replied to.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by littlestymaar on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @09:26AM (#47587048)
> The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB

It didn't, here's the comment in question:

> A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy

It makes no mention that an app should be under 70kB. It just note that 100MB is still *enormous* compared to 70kB.

And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by ben-schaaf on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @11:34PM (#47596506)
> And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone.

It can't be explained by images and fonts alone, I agree, but images and fonts alone are still enormous compared to 70kB. On my screen an "e" on this site is 10*11 pixels. Subpixel positioning means we need at least 6 copies of each letter, subpixel antialiasing means we need three channel alpha (3 bytes per pixel), we have variations of bold, italic and bold-italic, 95 printable letters in ascii, that's a low-ball of 750kB for one size of one font. This comment page alone has 4 different sizes, I'd expect a chat app to have a few more.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by littlestymaar on Friday April 03, 2026 @04:18AM (#47624334)
Well even with your quite conservative calculations [1] you end up with a size that is absolutely reasonable and negligible in a 100MB footprint.

[1]: Realistically, you're never gonna have all 95 characters in all weights for all font size, so the actual number is going to much significantly lower than the theoretical envelope. In practice, there'll be a main (font,size), that will have all glyphs (and it's going to be more than 95 because of the ligatures) in normal weight and no italic, with a subset of the glyphs in the three other modes, most likely not evenly distributed between modes. Then you'll have additional fonts (for UI labels, titles, etc) that are going to have much less represented glyphs and almost no variations of weight or italic if at all. Obviously the font(s) used for titles in going to have a bigger budget relatively to the glyph sample size, because each one is bigger than your baseline "e"

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by cosmicgadget on Sunday March 29, 2026 @05:08PM (#47567336)
How much? You typically don't want more than a few different fonts on a given document. And neither fonts nor web images should be bigger than hundreds of kilobytes. How do we get to gigs?
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by conductr on Sunday March 29, 2026 @07:09PM (#47568422)
> How do we get to gigs?

Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves?

While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by cosmicgadget on Sunday March 29, 2026 @09:58PM (#47569580)
Can you be more specific? Yes I am familiar with LinkedIn.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by conductr on Monday March 30, 2026 @05:58PM (#47580230)
Their apps do a lot and usually do not run well in my experience. Meaning they can freeze and lock things up on occasion.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by stackghost on Sunday March 29, 2026 @07:23PM (#47568516)
>How do we get to gigs?

Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise.

What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple.

So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by jasonfarnon on Sunday March 29, 2026 @08:18PM (#47568934)
"What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies"

I never knew this open secret. In my day msft was very glamorous and I guess something like oracle played the role you're ascribing to msft now. I wonder what their strategy was? (I tend to doubt this was a careless/unexamined decision.) Maybe they figured that paying extra for individuals doesn't get you much if you have enough structure in place? A Bill Bellichik approach to hiring. Is the relationship you're making (FAANG salaries == better products) accepted as true?

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by computomatic on Sunday March 29, 2026 @10:47PM (#47569860)
I only have my own observations of their products and secondhand info but my understanding is Microsoft simply doesn’t care about engineering. They have a sales pitch (product idea), then they build and ship the MVP that can earn money. If something sells, they figure they can solve scaling by throwing enough money at it. Classic b-tier tech company (and startup) garbage. They never work out the unit economics, etc.

FAANG (at least the few I’m familiar with) tend to be engineering companies. They hire talented engineers who can work from first principles and build products with profitable unit economics that solve interesting new problems. I don’t think Microsoft even knows what software engineering would mean.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by alain94040 on Sunday March 29, 2026 @08:39PM (#47569092)
Good question. For a long time I think the justification was location: Microsoft is in Seattle, and it’s only the Bay Area that is getting inflated salaries.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by stateofinquiry on Monday March 30, 2026 @01:16AM (#47570616)
I don't see mention of this in the discussion, so I will add: I think people also don't close tabs. And probably these LI tabs have been up for a long time. Maybe weeks or months.

I completely exit my web browser(s) at least 1x per day, and use bookmarks to get back to pages I need. As a result, I don't have issues with memory leaks or unbounded growth of RAM use. For me, its just the "proper" way to use a program like a web browser, but I'm old enough to be from the era that restarting programs and the OS could fix issues. I recognize that most people feel it is unreasonable to quit the browser, pretty much ever.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by troupo on Sunday March 29, 2026 @05:25PM (#47567504)
Well, and then you have Claude Code which at one point needed 68GB of RAM to run https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987

:)

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by thephyber on Sunday March 29, 2026 @05:18PM (#47567429)
I’m guessing you mean “does” in the sense of a user-facing feature.

I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by weare138 on Monday March 30, 2026 @02:43AM (#47571162)
I remember when your computer had 128MB of ram and could still run an entire desktop OS, web browser and chat app at the same time.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by charcircuit on Sunday March 29, 2026 @06:06PM (#47567901)
Voyager 1 is several orders of magnitude simpler as a product so it makes sense that it uses several orders of magnitude less memory.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by bluedino on Sunday March 29, 2026 @06:08PM (#47567917)
That was probably an incredible amount of memory back then. And it probably cost $1,000 USD for 1KB. Who knows how much radiation-hardened space memory was. 10 times that?
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by zirkonit on Sunday March 29, 2026 @08:29PM (#47569004)
In consumer space, 69 KB of RAM (138 x 4 kbit chips) would cost around $1700 70s dollars for the entire package, ~$10k in modern dollars.

Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by Finnucane on Sunday March 29, 2026 @09:40PM (#47569484)
consumer space and space space chips.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by saltyoldman on Sunday March 29, 2026 @09:35PM (#47569451)
Wouldn't they just put a lead plate around the computer? That can't cost 100k in 70s
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by kulahan on Sunday March 29, 2026 @10:01PM (#47569597)
Lead makes things worse, not better. High-energy particles go straight through a couple mm of lead no problem, and lead itself is radioactive anyways. The problem is when a particle punches straight through a chip, leaving some energetic charge behind. You won't stop that with a paper-thin layer of lead.

Also, lead is extremely dense.

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by hunterpayne on Sunday March 29, 2026 @10:49PM (#47569866)
"and lead itself is radioactive anyways"

Um, I guess in that there are naturally occurring isotopes of lead that are unstable. But those are very rare and can be removed. By this standard, the chips themselves are radioactive since they are made of silicon. By this standard, you, everything you eat, every plant and animal is radioactive since there are trace isotopes of carbon that are radioactive (that's how carbon dating works). And sunlight is very radioactive by this standard.

However, the materials we actually use in chips is highly processed and radioactive isotopes will likely be removed if a centrifuge was used in any step in concentration process. Likewise the lead used in a space shield will probably have similar processing of the material

"Also, lead is extremely dense."

This is the real reason lead isn't used. There are plenty of other elements that shield ionizing radiation quite well and are less dense. However, they are also more expensive than lead which is why we use lead on earth for shielding (its cheap) and use something else in space (where density is more important than price).

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by kulahan on Monday March 30, 2026 @03:06AM (#47571295)
No, the real reason it isn't used is because coating your chips in something doesn't really work

edit: ...when you don't have the protection of the atmosphere to begin with*

Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by mysterydip on Sunday March 29, 2026 @09:42PM (#47569494)
lead being heavy, I wonder if that tradeoff wasn’t worth it?
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by tliltocatl on Monday March 30, 2026 @02:14AM (#47570981)
Because lead turns a single high-energy particle (that would disturb a single bit and punch through) into a shower of many low-energy particles (that would disturb many bits AND induce lattice damage over a wide area).
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by thomasgeelens on Sunday March 29, 2026 @06:30PM (#47568102)
This right here! I commented about that in that thread, it's like: This 5G calls drops, LinkedIN uses GB's of memory, my fridge needs an update to get the light on but Voyager 1 is out there on 69kb.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by wontopos on Sunday March 29, 2026 @11:24PM (#47570085)
To be fair, Voyager 1 doesn't have to render 47 "congratulate your connection" notifications at the same time.
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs by OptionOfT on Monday March 30, 2026 @01:05AM (#47570564)
With autosuggestions to click so you don't even have to type anymore!