The Pyra is crying!


I've gotten to over 8GiB memory use mostly with several virtual machines running while using two heavy IDEs (a project has design and template files in both, which sucks). Just because of that case I need 16GiB in my workstation, but I've never needed swap at home after going 16GiB.
Well yeah, I know it's quite easy to need a lot of RAM for some specific reasons, but the point is that these are use cases outside of what most people would consider "normal use". Not a lot of people run VMs on a regular basis, and certainly not on-the-go.
 
If necessary I can run a Signal Integrity analysis check on the memory traces (mainly DQS, DQ# and address) according to JEDEC standard. Sometimes we have intermittent operation from the memory (losing some bits from time to time). Just need the layout from the ECAD tool and IBIS models of the memory and controller.
 
I have 32 GiBs of RAM in my desktop. At the moment, 27 GiBs are in use, of which 25 or so GiBs are from Chromium, with a multitude of tabs open. Chromium is the reason I made sure to get 32 GiBs of RAM. It should be possible to write a multi-tabbed browser where one tab does not take up 40 MiBs or so, but I cannot be nothered to write it myself.

Other than web browsers (I use SeaMonkey for YouTube), I barely ever exceed 2 GiBs RAM use. So, since I am unlikely to want to have a 1000 web-browser tabs open on the Pyra, it is not desperately important to get 8 GiBs for it, or even 4 GiBs.
 
I have 32 GiBs of RAM in my desktop. At the moment, 27 GiBs are in use, of which 25 or so GiBs are from Chromium, with a multitude of tabs open. Chromium is the reason I made sure to get 32 GiBs of RAM. It should be possible to write a multi-tabbed browser where one tab does not take up 40 MiBs or so, but I cannot be nothered to write it myself.


Other than web browsers (I use SeaMonkey for YouTube), I barely ever exceed 2 GiBs RAM use. So, since I am unlikely to want to have a 1000 web-browser tabs open on the Pyra, it is not desperately important to get 8 GiBs for it, or even 4 GiBs.
My Linux work laptop only has 4GB of RAM, I often run over a dozen tabs on chrome and never required to use the swap... I personally never felt the need of having more than 4GB in a Linux environment, unless you are doing a lot of virtual machines.

Edit: also never understood why anyone needs to keep 20+ tabs open either, Let alone 1000.
 
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also never understood why anyone needs to keep 20+ tabs open either, Let alone 1000.
"Hey, this looks a little involving, I shall leave it for later." + "Wikipedia! Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab. Interesting-looking link! Open-in-new-tab."

The Wikipedia part applies, also, to the c2.com wiki (otherwise know as Wiki and WikiWikiWeb -- the original wiki!), Reddit, forums of any kind, Slashdot, Hacker News, Phoronix, BBC News, The Guardian etc. etc. etc.. It is too much of a chore to close all the tabs manually. In the last year or so, I have made the habit of starting Wikipedia or BBC News in a new window every time so I can, at the end of a "session", close the entire window and the tabs within in just a couple of clicks.

What I really need, and briefly considered making myself, is a web-browser with a bash-style console, treating domains, pages, HTML-elements etc. as a tree of files and folders. Then I could "delete" the "en.wikipedia.org" folder to close all tabs from that domain; I could write a script to delete all tabs from a certain domain EXCEPT those that contain a number of keywords; I could write a script to rearrange all the tabs within windows by size, or to separate all tabs from a certain domain from all the windows and put them into a new window. The possibilities would be endless. Alas, I know of no such web-browser.
 
CTRL + W is your friend...
 
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There should totally be an option to "park" tabs that have been inactive for a long time. Either by simply reloading the page the next time the tab is opened, or saving them to disk for local loading once the tab is reopened. This would save a LOT of ram and, more importantly, swapping for people with reasonnable amount of RAM (4 to 8 GiB).

I personnally am a scientist making graphics in python, doing latex, having a lot of opened pages/articles in chrome and running a number of random unoptimized java programs. That scenario can eat up a combined amout of up to 8GiB of ram on linux over time.

For the pyra though, most people will probably simply run a single demanding program at once, or some lightweight ones. Although browsers could become problematic.
 
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Selling my ps vita as I don't use it anymore. The Pyra will be my only portable gaming device then.

Hurry up ed!!! :)
 
Looking forward to the Pyra as a full laptop replacement for me.  If somebody makes a nice youtube downloader for the Pyra then I'd be 1000% set, that and minecraft... Minecraft on the pyra would just be the icing on the pyra cake.
 
The joys of hardware design. ED pretty much jinxed this from the start with the overconfidence he showed about it, I was just waiting for a mistake in the layout to show its ugly face :p
 
The joys of hardware design. ED pretty much jinxed this from the start with the overconfidence he showed about it, I was just waiting for a mistake in the layout to show its ugly face :p
I was expecting a mistake or more, but was hoping it was one that doesn't prevent testing the rest!
 
The joys of hardware design. ED pretty much jinxed this from the start with the overconfidence he showed about it, I was just waiting for a mistake in the layout to show its ugly face :p
I was expecting a mistake or more, but was hoping it was one that doesn't prevent testing the rest!
Ah well your cautious approach is well founded.
Its got to be just right before more pcbs are produced.
 
There should totally be an option to "park" tabs that have been inactive for a long time. Either by simply reloading the page the next time the tab is opened, or saving them to disk for local loading once the tab is reopened. This would save a LOT of ram and, more importantly, swapping for people with reasonnable amount of RAM (4 to 8 GiB).
At least firefox doesn't load tabs in other tab groups until you open the group. I have several tab groups that I use like transient bookmarks. I have a "to read" tab group, several context-specific tab groups and a "general" tab group. I clear the "general" tab group every once in a while, putting any pages I still need to separate groups. This way when I open the browser it only loads a handful of pages, while still keeping the other tabs available. I use bookmarks only for permanent stuff.
 
There should totally be an option to "park" tabs that have been inactive for a long time. Either by simply reloading the page the next time the tab is opened, or saving them to disk for local loading once the tab is reopened. This would save a LOT of ram and, more importantly, swapping for people with reasonnable amount of RAM (4 to 8 GiB).
At least firefox doesn't load tabs in other tab groups until you open the group. I have several tab groups that I use like transient bookmarks. I have a "to read" tab group, several context-specific tab groups and a "general" tab group. I clear the "general" tab group every once in a while, putting any pages I still need to separate groups. This way when I open the browser it only loads a handful of pages, while still keeping the other tabs available. I use bookmarks only for permanent stuff.
It looks like tabs/windows and bookmarks are too crude an approximation of what some people really want: layers of cache.

  • pages currently using (switching between them, having multiple pages on screen) : these should be in-memory in rendered form, scripts running and all
  • pages not currently using : pause the scripts, after a while unload the scripts to free whatever memory they use
  • pages that are inactive for a while but might still be needed 'soon' : these could still be in-memory (as compressed html/css/js) but not rendered, so much more compact
  • pages that are inactive for a longer time: stored on disk (even the bits that are not supposed to be cached)
  • pages that are inactive for an even longer time: only store the URL and the bits that are supposed to be cached (rationale: if it's that long ago, the other bits have to be re-fetched anyway)
and most importantly: it should not be the user who decides when to move something to a deeper layer (e.g. by bookmarking it and closing the tab), but some kind of heuristic -- could even be somewhat user-adaptive.

Browsing the web should not be something that requires many gigabytes of memory -- after all, an average web page is about 2MB in size (mostly graphics) in transmission size, so 2GB should be enough to store 1000 pages (probably much more than that, because they're likely to share many resources like images, style sheets and script libraries).

Large obfuscated proprietary JavaScript programs are another problem: these effectively reduce your browser to a virtual machine that slowly executes sandboxed blobs. There are little possibilities for memory sharing with such an execution model, even though many pages will be based on the same libraries like JQuery.
 
Im crying because off topic, and the CPU Board seems to have some issues, and it need 5 Weeks to get a new one..

The only good thing is, i have more time to enjoy my Pandora :)
 
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