From 64MB to 16GB: How Software Got So Hungry

Somewhere between Windows XP and today, "how much RAM do I have" stopped meaning the same thing as "how much storage do I have," and the two got tangled in a lot of memories. That mix-up is worth one sentence, not a section: 256 MB and 512 MB were hard-drive sizes from an older era, and 16 GB is a RAM figure from a different one.

The better question is why the RAM floor itself moved so far, and who actually moved it.

Part of the answer is visible on your own machine right now. Open Task Manager on Windows, or Activity Monitor on macOS, sort by memory, and look at whichever chat or notes app is sitting in the background doing nothing. On a lot of systems that idle window is holding several hundred megabytes of RAM for a job a plain text file could do.

That single number, sitting quietly in your tray, is the first data point in this piece, and it did not get there by accident.

The floor Microsoft actually published

Microsoft's minimum system requirements are public documents, and read together they form a paper trail.

Windows XP shipped in 2001 needing 64 MB of RAM, 128 MB recommended, confirmed the day Microsoft announced its "XP Ready" program (BetaNews, June 2001). Windows 7's final 2009 requirements doubled that floor to 1 GB on 32-bit systems and 2 GB on 64-bit (OSNews).

By the time Windows 10 shipped in 2015, the floor still sat at that same 1 GB or 2 GB line; Microsoft raised the OEM baseline to a flat 2 GB the following year.

Four gigabytes became the next floor with Windows 11 in 2021, a figure Microsoft still lists on its own support page (Microsoft). Then, starting with the 2024 Copilot+ PC certification, Microsoft set 16 GB of DDR5 or LPDDR5 memory as the mandatory minimum for any machine claiming on-device Copilot features, alongside a 40-plus-TOPS neural processing unit (Microsoft, May 2024).

That is roughly a 256-times increase in the published minimum across 23 years, and the last jump was not requested by users. It was written into a certification checklist.

timeline
    title Microsoft's published minimum RAM, 2001 to 2024
    2001 : Windows XP : 64 MB minimum
    2009 : Windows 7 : 1 GB (32-bit) / 2 GB (64-bit)
    2015 : Windows 10 : 1 GB (32-bit) / 2 GB (64-bit)
    2021 : Windows 11 : 4 GB
    2024 : Copilot+ PC spec : 16 GB DDR5/LPDDR5 mandated

The other half: an overhead you can actually measure

Certification policy explains part of the jump, but not all of it.

A second, independently measurable cause lives inside the apps themselves, and developers already have a name for it: the Electron tax. Electron ships a full copy of Chromium and Node.js inside every app built on it, so a chat client or password manager is, underneath its window, running a private browser just to draw a login form (Electron's own documentation).

The clearest teardown of this shows up in an unlikely place: 1Password's own community forum, where a user measured every process by hand in 2021.

1Password 7, a native app, used 134.3 MB across three processes for a completely empty vault. 1Password 8, rebuilt on Electron, used 326.2 MB across seven processes for the same empty vault, 2.5 times the memory, before a single password was ever stored in it (1Password Community).

Microsoft Teams shows a related pattern, though its current client is not actually Electron; Microsoft moved Teams to its own WebView2 back in 2021, a different bundled-browser approach with the same basic tradeoff of shipping a rendering engine per app (Office 365 for IT Pros). Teams still commonly holds 800 MB to 1 GB of RAM while idle in the tray, climbing past 1.5 GB during a call (SP Guides).

In a Microsoft 365 admin center message on November 25, 2025, Microsoft announced it would split Teams' calling stack into a new child process, ms-teams_modulehost.exe, to cut startup time and resource use, with rollout beginning in January 2026 (BleepingComputer). A related plan to rename the main executable was separately canceled in January 2026, according to Microsoft's own update to the announcement.

The popular claim that a Tauri app uses "half the memory" of the same app in Electron turns out to be close on bundle size and overstated on memory. BetterStack built one identical application, a screen recorder with editing and export, on both frameworks and measured directly instead of repeating marketing numbers (BetterStack).

Eighty-two percent smaller in bundle size, a real and dramatic difference, next to only a 15 percent lower idle memory footprint, once Tauri's own helper processes for networking and rendering are all added up rather than just the main process a task manager shows first.

Tauri was also the slower of the two to cold-start in this specific test, 311 milliseconds against Electron's 273, a detail most "Tauri is faster" claims leave out.

This isn't theoretical for whatever install base you ship to. Valve's own Steam Hardware Survey for June 2026 puts 16 GB as the single most common RAM configuration among gaming PCs, at 41.57 percent, just ahead of 32 GB at 36.79 percent (Guru3D).

Gamers buy more RAM than most people ever will, and even there, 16 GB is the ceiling a plurality of machines sit at, not a comfortable floor with room to spare for a browser's worth of chat app.

Measure your own app before you blame the user's RAM

If you ship an Electron app, you do not have to guess where its memory goes.

The main process exposes app.getAppMetrics(), which returns per-process memory in kilobytes for every renderer, GPU helper, and utility process the app has spawned, the same breakdown the 1Password forum user built by hand from Activity Monitor. Logging it on an interval turns a vague complaint about RAM into a number you can put in a changelog.

const { app } = require('electron');

function logMemory() {
  const metrics = app.getAppMetrics();
  for (const proc of metrics) {
    const mb = (proc.memory.workingSetSize / 1024).toFixed(1);
    console.log(`${proc.type} (pid ${proc.pid}): ${mb} MB`);
  }
}

app.whenReady().then(() => setInterval(logMemory, 30000));

Run that against your own app for a day and you will know whether your idle footprint looks more like 1Password 7's native original or its Electron-based successor. If the number embarrasses you, the fix does not have to be a full rewrite.

The real, measured win in moving to Tauri is bundle size, not a guaranteed memory miracle, and moving only the always-running background window to a native Tauri shell, while keeping the main UI in Electron, is a smaller project than most teams assume.

What Wirth already told us

None of this is a new problem. Only the scale has changed.

Niklaus Wirth wrote in 1995 that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster, a line he credited to his colleague Martin Reiser (Wirth, "A Plea for Lean Software," IEEE Computer 28(2), 1995, via Wikipedia). Wirth was describing text editors bloating from 8 kilobytes to roughly 800 kilobytes, or "100 times that much" by his own count. Three decades later the same complaint fits chat clients bloating from a few kilobytes of real purpose into hundreds of megabytes of bundled browser.

Sidebar: the industry keeps rediscovering this. At Google I/O in 2009, Sergey Brin told reporters that co-founder Larry Page had found that software gets twice as slow every eighteen months, and that Google wanted to "break" that pattern and make its software faster on the same hardware, citing JavaScript gains as evidence (Computerworld Australia).

The press started calling it Page's Law. Within days, commentators pointed out that Page had simply restated Wirth's 1995 observation, fourteen years later, without citing him (The Noisy Channel).

So when a modern system asks for 16 GB where 512 MB of storage once felt enormous, the honest answer has two parts.

Part of it is real: on-device AI and modern sandboxing need memory that simply was not a workload in 2001. The rest is a bill an industry chose to write, one Electron window at a time, and unlike most of computing's bigger mysteries, this one you can measure the exact size of on your own machine tonight.