The amusing nature of memory consumption and the modern web. Going by Activity Monitor’s memory page as a measure, wikipedia is pretty darn memory efficient at a couple hundred megs–for a website that’s about 95% content aside from the CMS, I’d call that’s pretty good. For sake of a value, one of the random pages loaded were around 180 – 200 MB.

By contrast my own website (also mostly content aside from the CMS) and Google’s home page, burn around 400-500 MB. Which to me, feels excessive, but to be fair, part of why I started to believe in whole-lotta-memory designs was in the 2010s when I realized 2 GB was not enough to surf the web anymore, unless you loved trashing hard drives. Most content-heavy rather than ad heavy websites, fit that description as well.

Now for comparison? A few common news sites that you’ll see just about any compute nerd visit: around 1.5 – 2 GB for basically any article and easily reaching 3 – 4 GB in activity monitor. Largely depending on the amount of ads, and whether or not it’s a website that endeavors to load the content first. So basically, the modern websites consume so much RAM that we should be charging websites for the resources their advertising consumes rather than supporting them by not running ad blockers 😜

Ya know, if you just throw enough videos modern web advertising may be to computer memory usage what the pop up ad was to the 1990s web browsing experience. Seriously, web ads were Really A Lot Worse Back Then ™ when actual pop up windows were allowed.

At this point, I think the only thing that consumes more RAM than the modern web is working with high resolution graphics and artificial intelligence with loads of parameters, lol.