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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

It was 2010. Our default work machines had 16gb of ram. Eclipse ran, but it was tight. Especially while debugging. Some developers also apparently liked to open a second eclipse instance for some reason. You'd go OOM pulling stunts like that.

They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.

In eclipse's defence, we were working on a very large java codebase. But that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. I've never seen a java codebase come in any other size.

I'm running intellij (RustRover) right now, and its sitting on about 4.5gb of ram. That still seems very inefficient to me. But it doesn't sound that bad compared to eclipse.

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16gb. Ram in 2010?! That's like top 10%, not standard. Even now computers are shipping with 16/32gb ram

At this time laptops still could have memory upgrades, and memory was pretty cheap compared to today. The first thing I did when I bought a new laptop was buying two 8GB SoDIMMs, it was way cheaper than ordering the upgrade from factory.

The thing is, memory in personal computer have plateaued for quite some time. 16GB was not uncommon in 2010. Things are not like the crazy 90s and early 2000s where PC configuration become obsolete in less than two years.

That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse?

Eclipse, unlike IntelliJ offers "project" view were you have have many "solutions" open at once. Even with multiple Eclipse instances open, it's hard to imagine it consuming so much ram.

Perhaps you had other company-required software running. I was working on relatively largeish codebases and very happy with 8GB of ram until 2018ish.

Regardless, an IDE is more than a text editor, so your claim that RustRover with 4.5GB of ram is inefficient is misguided.

> That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse?

In 2010 it couldn't have been anything later than Win 7; Win 8 was released in 2012.

>They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.

With the current prices it is still wild mate.

Funny thing, memory was cheaper, and machines were upgradeable. People used to buy low memory machines and upgrade them with after market memory to avoid paying DELL or Apple's memory upgrade tax.

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