How much RAM does your dev machine have?

Maybe more than one choice should be allowed. For example I have two dev machines.

Go with what’s in your main/preferred machine

I need an option that says 36

I should add that RAM is usually the first thing I upgrade, but I had to buy this (16GB) machine out of necessity as a make-do as I’ve got a lot to catch up on and my old Mac had just become unusable (thanks Apple!) I figured I could sell my old Mac for around the same amount so would have gotten it for free anyway. However I have been very impressed with the machine for general use and general dev use so if anyone needs a machine just for that and wanted to try a Mac, don’t be afraid of getting a 16GB model (I will probably revert back to a 64GB machine when I need to work with graphical software - though again, this 16GB machine is even ok at that).

Ah sorry! I looked on Crucial’s site and the Apple site and added all the options I saw. You could pick 32GB if you feel it is close enough. The poll is mainly to give people a general idea of what others are using or able to use without issue, to help them with their own purchasing decision.

In Gentoo depending on the package in order to compile it you need to have even 2GB for each CPU thread. In the worst case for the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX (96 core, 192 threads) you need at least 384 GB RAM (6 x 64 GB).

Of course you need to have some GB free for the DE and other apps/services, but on the other side you can limit number of jobs in the compilation …

Finally, a place in the polls for one of my unorthodox configurations.

I had to get 48 GB of RAM… 32 wasn’t enough. I use NeoVim + tmux and a lot of tmux panes… ~400 MB per NeoVim instance (due to the Elixir LSP running on each one) really adds up. Plus, after leaving Firefox open, the RAM usage starts to crawl up and up, hovering around ~36 GB total usage after a while. But I still haven’t needed to upgrade to 64 GB yet.

I have 16gb and I almost never hit the memory limit. Most of the time it resides in <40%. I develop somewhat big backends with LSP and in different languages, I run lots of different browsers simultaneously and I use memory-leaking and inefficient desktop apps (like telegram-desktop). Sometimes I run neural networks with eGPU and they use a lot of graphics memory, but it is unrelated to the topic. And I also have a QubesOS-alike setup where I run some apps in virtual machines (like browsers or videogames) but even then memory stays in 2GB per VM limit.

I used to work with 4GB machine and it was just fine, but sometimes I would have to close the old tabs or reopen some leaking websites.

I have no idea why would anyone have any setup which consumes more than 16GB (even with neural networks).

For example, right now I have ~20 tabs open in firefox, 3 tabs in chrome, 2 different big Elixir projects with LSP servers and one PHP project with phpactor lsp server and I have a an mpv as a music player playing streaming music and a ayugram-desktop. Total memory consumption is 4.5GB. (2GBs are consumer by awful websites like slack, linear, notion, bitbucket)

For those of you with more than 64GB of RAM (looking at you @cmo @DaAnalyst @kokolegorille @patrickdm @Sorc96 @sbuttgereit) what made you opt for that much? Was there any specific reason?

I do a lot of SCADA and PLC work, i.e. running software that likes CPU and RAM. I often have several VMs running. It’s probably more than I need but better than being near the limit of what I need.

I think my Windows laptop has 16gb and M3 MacBook has 32gb.

In the last three year I switched most of my activities from web development to bioinformatics, where RAM availability is a primary factor for many kind of analysis.
I originally had 32 GB in my dev PC, which were nearly enough but often limiting.