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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

To ask those complaining about 8gb not being enough... Please name one thing that won't allow you to do which is crucial in your day to day workflow.

I'm not saying i don't believe you, I'm just genuinely curious.

Edit: Looking at this thread, I have to say there has to be a cause and effect here somewhere. You have a million web-developers saying they need more than 8GB to use Chrome to surf web-pages and web-apps.

I'm pretty sure web-apps sucking that amount of resources was caused by giving web-devs machines with 8GBs+ of RAM to begin with. Giving them more, wont fix the problem. It will only make it worse.

As for a developer-anecdote: Almost all bugs post-shipping bugs I've experienced and had to fix, more than 50% has only been reproducable on low-resource constrained environments.

By super-specing your dev-environment, you are shipping bugs you cannot detect. You just don't know it.

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Chrome.

not being facetious, but as time goes on it seems more websites load more javascript and chrome takes more memory keeping it's state, my macbook has 8G of ram and when I'm actually working on it doing my daily basics it's nearly unusable. (Word,Excel,Thunderbird,Chrome,MySQLworkbench,PGAdmin,Cyberduck,MS Remote desktop, terminalsx10(a few python shells) and gvim x5)

I've taken to using my desktops more because I have the freedom to just "spin up" whatever I need in virtual machines and in minutes have an entire test infrastructure.

Run an OS X VM in order to illicitly develop iOS apps. Run a Windows 8 VM to work on legit Windows apps. Run both VM's at the same time.

Anything under 16 GB is unacceptable to me.

Developer edition? Nope, not really. I need Linux, Windows and OS X. So my only option remains, as ever, a macbook pro with 16GB RAM.

> So my only option remains, as ever, a macbook pro with 16GB RAM

If you are OK with running an illicit OSX VM, then a Thinkpad T or X series should be a fine choice if you prefer to run a flavor of Linux as the native OS. Thinkpad native Linux support is better than the macbook pro hardware (no funny fan glitches, etc). It basically "just works" and you can get 16GB's from the factory.

> Anything under 16 GB is unacceptable to me.

Because you've set very high requirements, as you've stated.

> Developer edition? Nope, not really.

Yes, it still is.

Why would you need both of them running at the same time though? Also, unless you are on Linux, you probably don't need both of these two VMs. Lastly, I don't quite understand why any serious developer would want to run their dev environment in a VM to begin with.

Lastly, I don't quite understand why any serious developer would want to run their dev environment in a VM to begin with.

I'm really surprised to hear this; I spent enough years working on a local dev environment to know the pain. Heck, I've seen the bugs that come from it as well.

Now that Docker's around, and you can run a production-equivalent environment on your local machine, I'd never go back to the bad old days.

I don't understand how I'm supposed to not do that with a Linux laptop? I need to develop Windows apps. Without a VM....dual-boot? No thanks. Don't have the patience for that. So what other options do I have?

My laptop has 8GB of ram, and I hit the wall fairly frequently.

In particular, I tend to run a tab-heavy browsing style. Between that and Eclipse and whatever I'm puttering around on in Eclipse, it adds up.

And it's not a 8GB limit, unfortunately. In practice it's substantially less. If I go above about 5GB in use, I start dropping file cache, and things slow down substantially. (It doesn't help that I'm not running an SSD currently.)

Is any of this crucial? No. I could work around it, and did so frequently on my previous machine. But, if nothing else, the time adds up. And RAM usage isn't exactly going down over time.

And that's not even getting into when I boot up a VM.

From yesterday: I compile a large C++ code base in work, and a full rebuild takes about 15 minutes on my 40 core, 32GB ram desktop, and uses almost 20GB of RAM while doing so.

That's... intense.

An extreme case, for sure.

You likely would be remoting into this machine to compile this work, in any scenario involving you working on a mobile device.

With that being said, 16GB would preclude you, too.

Like the fellow above, still genuinely curious how 8GB is repelling a significant amount of people for a development machine.

A pixel2 with 8GB is a rocket ship, for my general full-stackery and system administrationating purposes.

> still genuinely curious how 8GB is repelling a significant amount of people for a development machine.

If I'm only remoting into the machine, then it doesn't count as a development machine. I could remote in from a machine running a P4 with 512MB ram by that logic.

Yeah, but you may do different kinds of development. Your work C++ dev may not use the same system resources as some side project (which you may not want to use the work machine for anyways). Additionally, the hi-res screen could be useful.

I think it’s fair to say that your use case lies outside the current performance envelope available in laptop form :)

absolutely, but the parent didn't specify people using laptops.

Interesting. I'm working on a multi-gigabyte mixed codebase (c#, c++, etc) on a 32gb workstation.

I've never managed to exceed 10-ish GBs memory usage when you exclude OS caches, which strictly aren't needed to complete the build.

Using the visual studio compiler, the build tool we use spawns many instances of VC.exe, (up to 40) and they have a tendency to allocate about 2GB each. Normally, we only use 10-15 of the cores, but a full build will be all 40, and has began to crash the compiler.

I am running a Dell XPS 15 (nice machine btw) and currently using 11GB of the 16GB RAM. I'm running way too many Chrome tabs (20 at the moment) and have a few VS projects open with one running, SSMS, an RDP session, a few other apps. The one VS solution is >100 projects (we're working on getting more into nuget packages), so that is the primary killer.

To ask those complaining about 8gb not being enough... Please name one thing that won't allow you to do which is crucial in your day to day workflow.

Run two or three VMs, plus an IDE, plus have the standard apps open.

The cherry on the cake is then being able to then fire up another VM or separate IDE without giving it another a thought.

I've got 16GB in my MacBook and right now, with a browser, Spotify, Slack, an IDE, mail client, calendar and Keynote open, I'm using 9.05GB. If I need to start a VM that usage is going to shoot up.

Those applications are crucial to my workflow.

Spinning up 4 (sometimes 5) modules of our companies Java project and running IntelliJ IDEA. IntelliJ alone goes over 4gb of ram usage at times. Chrome easily hogs a couple gigs. And then about a 1gb for each Java module.

Running eclipse. I wish I was joking.

(I'm pretty sure it's shoddy third-party addons rather than eclipse itself - a clean eclipse can run fine in <1gb - but either way I end up in the same place)

I was going to ask if one of the fine IDEs from JetBrains (e.g. IntelliJ) would suit your needs, but then I discovered that my PyCharm instance is currently using 9GB of memory. Whoops.

Multiple vagrant vm or docker container setup for SOA development. Add an IDE and multiple browser tabs you will easily start paging.

I often run static analysis tools against large code bases.

As a consultant I need to be able to travel and won't always have access, or be able to send code across the internet.

I think my case is common for technical consultants doing deep code inspection.

Run multiple VMs for testing (windows, OSX, etc..).

Run two Android emulators at the same time.

Virtual machines

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