486
oddly specific
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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I'm typing this on a 64 bit device. Why anyone would limit something to an 8 bit number in 2025 is really odd.
It’s for their servers. I guess it might have to do with cache optimization reasons. For performance reasons, they want to ensure they can fit as much as possible in the cache. One extra byte can throw the memory alignment off, which cause wasted space in cache.
Just my guess. There might be other reasons.
A single username will use up more memory than an 8-bit limitation to the number of users will save.
On a device with many gigabytes of RAM and probably terabytes of storage.
I guess when you have billions of users, and presumably tens or hundreds of billions of instances of a thing living in your sever every bit adds up? I don't even know where to even start doing the napkin math for something like that.
100 billion messages per day and over half of them in groups apparently. It's a lot, but 3 bytes per message is still not a lot of data. I'd guess they pack the metadata as tight as possible.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t like this line of thinking. In the tech industry there is far too much bloat that we just accept due to cheap memory and storage.
Whatsapp has 2 billion users.
The difference is 16 billion bits compared to 128 billion bits, or about 16 GB and that is just for the number.
When working with big sizes, memory optimization is key.