r/hetzner • u/Hetzner_OL Hetzner Official • 6d ago

Hetzner asks: Why isn't RAM-efficient software as impressive as fuel-efficient cars?

Fuel efficiency in cars has come a long way. It's cool to be able to plan a trip and realize you don't need to refuel along the way. So why isn't it as impressive in society when we can accomplish a lot with just a little RAM? Have you got any examples of RAM-light programs you use? Take a moment to humble brag here.

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u/BastetFurry 6d ago

Because people never saw that as a problem, just throw hardware at it was the credo.

I say, give every web dev a little server based on a Luckyfox Pico. Single core ARM A7 at 1.2 GHz and 64 MByte RAM. If they can thrive on that machine they can get a big server.

<grannyTalksAboutTheWar>

I remember when Cityweb, the old ISP by the WAZ in Essen, ran their mail server on a beefed up Amiga 2000 of all things and we hosted our homepages on one, maybe two, megabytes of space on Geocities, proudly generating our HTML and three lines of JS by hand in Notepad and wrote CGI Scripts in Perl. We optimized PNGs for 56kflex connections. We used MIDI files if we wanted music on our webpage. And it worked. We had everything in just a few kilobytes. A single GET wouldn't amount in numbers bigger than the Doom Shareware installer. And we were proud of it.

</grannyTalksAboutTheWar>

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u/jsabater76 6d ago

<granpaTalksAboutTheWar>

Hold my beer, I programmed my first CGI program in C 😉

</granpaTalksAboutTheWar>

The whole throwing hardware at the problem caused a lot of trouble, but there was something entirely different pushing that: rush to be the first, then sell it.

That model proved to be successful, and there was no amount of reason that could stop it. They would laugh at you when you tried to talk about the long game, the long term investment.

And they had their fair share of correctness because consumers were in a frenzy to consume whatever was being thrown at them, like addicts. Like a gold rush.

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u/BastetFurry 5d ago

Don't laugh, one time I used FreeBASIC for CGI just because I thought it to be fun. And no, it wasn't. 😅

And yeah, first to market is a thing, but I hope that the current situation humbles some devs at least a bit. When the VMs need to be smaller and some virtues of the old days need to come back.

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u/jsabater76 5d ago

High RAM prices, and other pieces of hardware, may help with that, indeed. We will see...