It seems hard to remember how we lived before smartphones and our powerful laptops, however, if there's one thing most people agree to, it's that things were relatively smaller; games, videos, every digital resource took up as little space as possible. Our devices had memory in megabytes not gigabytes or terabytes as such every byte of memory was important.
ARE SLOWER DEVICES THE PRICE WE PAY FOR HIGH-QUALITY EXPERIENCES?
These days, we have powerful devices that hang and crash more frequently than devices used 15 years ago, we have more memory than ever yet we keep running out of space a lot faster than we used to. RAM is on the rise yet our devices feel a bit slower. This is not to say that all the fault lies in the programmers, if we're being factual we need to acknowledge that the quality of digital products is a lot higher than say 15 years ago and as such we need to consume more memory and resources than before.
MEMORY LEAK EXPLAINED
This brings me to one of the biggest problems in software solutions; memory leak. Simply put, a memory leak is what happens when applications and processes on your device keep running even after you're done with them thus taking up much-needed space and memory allocation resources. A couple of decades ago software developers were stricter with memory usage (because they absolutely had to be), these days with much more memory available on devices, a ton of developers have taken liberty for license (or do not know better) which has resulted in a lot of devices slowing down and/or crashing as a result of this strain.
MEMORY LEAKS ARE SILENT POISONS
Because memory leak isn't as apparent to the end-users as other bugs, it's way harder to detect. Memory leaks are however a huge issue. If you're tech-savvy enough to find the task manager on your PC (by pressing alt + ctrl + delete simultaneously) you'll get an eyeful of applications running and how much of your memory it is consuming. A lot of hanging on the devices can be attributed to the above, with the above keys, it's easy to close down those pesky activities that you don't need, with smartphones you have to monitor your RAM usage and clear apps you're not using anymore.
IN CONCLUSION
A lot of work is being done on addressing memory leaks on software solutions, more often than not, the software engineer isn't aware of memory leaks which is why they don't guard against them, with increased sensitization this problem will be nipped in the bud. Till then we'll just have to bite the bullet whenever we decide to use software solutions as it's hard to tell which has serious memory usage except by keeping track of them and that's quite a chore. A popular example of an application that can severely slow down your device is Google Chrome; the more tabs you open, the more resources it consumes and this is because the browser tabs aren't sharing resources with the other tabs (as is the standard). The benefit of this on Google Chrome is that the browser is less likely to crash if one tab has an issue as each tab is independent. The drawback is that Google Chrome will eat memory like a blackhole.