This is a pretty basic, "and what's the deal with airline food??" kinda observation, but
It's just been brought to my attention that a Chrome tab takes up a minimum of 24 to 28 MB of RAM*, even if it's looking at about:blank or an empty HTML page. There are good engineering reasons it might work this way but I am also thinking about how my first computer-shaped computer** had 4 MB of RAM and that was like, an OS plus sophisticated full apps. Later we upgraded to 8 MB RAM and that was a big deal
@mcc my first computer was a home-assembled 8086 clone (with a faster clock than any actual 8086), on a board that either couldn’t take as much as 4MB RAM, or by the time I wanted that much that kind of memory wasn’t available anymore. The year I learned C (the language Dad used) I wanted to use the Microsoft C compiler for DOS, which required 4MB RAM, and that Christmas Dad bought me a new motherboard, CPU, and 4MB of what I think was the then-new SIMM cards
@whitequark Good question. Should be a little under 192010804*4 bytes = 33 MB, assuming RGBA8888 but no stencil buffer. In which case the memory usage may be unusually low. However, would RAM and VRAM usage be reported together?
@whitequark@mcc I forget this sometimes when I despair of how absurdly huge everything is nowadays... 4K@32bpp is just shy of 32MB... My first machine with over a megabyte of ram (2MB) had a 20MB HDD and a 720x350x1bpp display...
@mcc the first computer I had /that could connect to the Internet and load web pages/ had like 16 MB I think. I made whole websites on that and posted them on geocities.
As reported by Chrome's built-in "Task Manager". There are various things that might make this report not quite accurate. For example, possibly some large portion of that 24 MB are copy-on-write VM pages that do not actually take up system resources until they are really needed.
** For purposes of this post I am not counting the Apple //c.
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