How much RAM does your dev machine have?

Wikis, Polls & Dev Envs Polls
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21

Late to the party, but my answer is “whatever the max amount of RAM I could put on that MacBook when I bought it”.

Weirdly, it’s mostly an amortisation technique to lengthen the useful life of the machine and spread the cost out more.

With MacBooks , you pay a heck of a lot for the core components like the screen, casing, keyboard, trackpad etc. I don’t resent it, because they’re all of the highest quality and will last for many years.

But then, if you skimp on the memory, you artificially limit the useful life of the system (e.g 18GB - 3 years tops, IMO), and are forced to replace everything, even though there’s still plenty of life in them.

In fact, anyone who bought an M1 with minimum RAM back in 2021, would be looking at an upgrade where they pay again for the exact same screen, keyboard, trackpad etc, even though theirs are probably still great, just to get more performance.

OTOH, having gone all in and maxed the RAM, I’ve never once thought “I wish I had less memory”. The systems are an absolute joy to use, and allow me a degree of optionality that love. The first few years even offer a sort of “if I can’t do it on my dev machine, I probably can’t do it (economically) anywhere else” sanity check.

Finally, I hate switching machines, so the less often I have to do it, the more time I can spend on other things :slight_smile:

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22

I have a m1 air with 8GB of ram. I can’t say that I see any performance degradation so far, even though I have sensed that the last major update is impacting negatively the performance and battery life, this most likely is done on porpose to slowly make older devices obsolete.

This is the thing I hate the most, as companies know about this and abuse it to the maximum. RAM and storage chips are soldered on the motherboard and you pay 2x-4x times more to get decent ram and storage. For example I got my mac for 800$ (8GB ram, 256GB storage), the next option with 16GB of ram costs almost twice the price. At this point, upgrading the device every 2-3 years costs the same as getting a proper spec from the start.

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23

Yeah, there’s all sorts of nuance in Apple’s pricing specifically.

Their “entry-level” products are often very competitively priced and you can get a lot of mileage out of them if you’re not a power user.

E.g: I picked up an iPhone SE in 2020 expecting to get a couple of years out of it, and surprisingly it’s still a perfectly serviceable phone if you don’t care too much about gaming, photography or other fancy things.

Their maxed-out options can keep on chugging for decades and generally wipe the floor with comparables from other brands, often ending up being better value over the entire lifecycle.

The middle of the pack is where things get tricky. Doesn’t particularly matter whether you’re looking at phones, tablets, MacBooks or watches, you end up with high base prices and often eye-watering upsells.

For example, the Watch Series 10 ostensibly starts at £399, but if you wanted the larger screen, titanium body and the link bracelet, it leaps up to £999. Meanwhile, the all-titanium Ultra 2, with bigger screen, better battery life etc, is £899. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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24

I’ve been using an M1 with 16GB as this was the max. With how fast the main disk is, it’s been a pleasure using it as my main (and only since my desktop requires some upgrades) computer for the last 3+ years.

This said, now that they can handle more RAM since the M2 or M3, I’m going to get more RAM next time as Firefox uses way too much and I have to kill it every now and then to release some.

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25

surely you can limit it with some flags

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26

As said it’s possible to limit number of jobs in compilation (simultanous tasks) in /etc/portage/make.conf

MAKEOPTS="--jobs n"

where n is number of jobs (threads). 50% less jobs means 50% less required RAM. However limiting so much does not makes sense. Good CPU needs a lot of memory, so if you are not ok with it then use other CPUs as otherwise the memory would be a bottleneck in this or any other situation …

For sure you cannot limit memory usage as there are pre-emerge checks for that. Of course there are no requirements like that for most of the packages, but that’s because most projects follows UNIX way of writing software i.e. small apps around one feature, so in practice you only need to be careful when compilling webview, browser, office or other “blob” of (definitely useful) features.

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27

yeah I remember leaving my laptop overnight on because “KDE is compiling”. Good times.

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