I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.
Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?
I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.
If you’re transferring files over a socket (like through SMB or SFTP), the receiving end usually has a small buffer, like 64KB. It’ll just pause the stream if it’s receiving data faster than it can push it to disk and the buffer gets full. So usually a file transfer won’t use much memory.
There is some poorly written software that doesn’t do that, though. I ran into a WebDAV server that didn’t do that when I was writing my own server. That’s where you could run into out of memory errors.
That lines up with what I know about networking, but on the software side I figured it would chew through memory quick (especially because it’s encrypting it on the fly).