I am creating a board game (nothing commercial, just a fun project) about system processes, and memory requriements for each process is going to be a key element in gameplay. In a nutshell, the game will let players, playing as different processes and applications, place tiles of memory on the board, and you win once you have enough memory! Each player is able to fight others for memory through rolling a die. I know browsers like Firefox uses around 1 GiB (can confirm by checking system monitor, I’m using LibreWolf).
Notably, I’m not asking about the system requirements of these processes, but the memory usage that each needs. And yes, I know, this will vary depending on the version and hardware it is running on, but general guestimates will be fine for this silly board game.
Preferably in nice increments (e.g. 1 GiB, 256 MiB), since each tile will represent a certain amount of memory. I’m planning for each tile to represent 128 MiB of RAM, meaning you need eight tiles as a browser to win, but this could be lowered in the future depending on how the game plays.
Since I don’t want the game to take too long, I will probably ignore huge memory hogs like video editors (consuming 8+ GiB depending on the project) and LLMs (consuming ungodly amounts of RAM depending on the model).
These processes could be of any kind, but they should be recognisable for the average person though, and preferably no brand names (e.g. “browser” instead of “Firefox”)
Why not do something retro and base it on classic Mac OS apps? Each one has a defined minimum and preferred memory allocation (reserves its memory at launch and has to stay within that allocation).
Otherwise, if you’re using a modern OS, most processes will allocate memory as they need it, depending on use. If there isn’t enough available, background processes will be dumped to virtual memory to make room for the active process. If all memory is used up, the active process will start moving not-recently-used data onto storage as well.
Classic Mac OS lines up much better with your scenario, and is easier to populate as you can just go on infinite mac, boot an OS version, load up some applications and get info on them to see how mich they allocate.