It's a staple of 'developers' to have fancy Macbooks while essentially just needing a shitton of RAM these days.
Programmers don't need bleeding edge, just a lot of RAM.
Programmers don't need bleeding edge, just a lot of RAM.
I recently upgraded from a 2015 Macbook pro to a new i9 one, and right now I'm working on a computer vision pipeline for some data – an embarrassingly parallel task. It takes about 15 minutes to run a process which would have previously taken about an hour. This is a direct improvement to my development experience (trust me!)
But there are a bunch of different reasons. Modern stacks can be annoyingly under-optimised; a large Webpack app with live reloading can be irritatingly slow even on recent machines. Fast SSDs are useful for people working with large datasets. Better GPUs can mean better UI performance and more screen space.
In short, remember that just because you don't need the hardware, doesn't mean that others don't! :)
If you work for a employer with deep pockets I guess sure why not? Otherwise a workstation you can remote connect to (if you work from home or travel) is probably good enough.
2015 MB i7 to i9 MB doesn't increase anything times 4.
How long have you been working on that task and waited an hour? The wasted labour cost might have bought you a dedicated compiling rack 2 weeks in.
How long could you have rented cloud ressources to bring that task down to close to instant for the cost of a i9 MB?
I am just curious tbh. I have various tasks like yours hobbywise. But the least thing I'd encourage my laptop to do is compile/render/analyse a problem that takes more than 60 seconds. Beware if you fully utilise a laptop like you describe shouldn't it become useless for everything else while doing that?
So much questions...
That's great, but I'm literally sitting at my desk doing it just now, so I can assure you it's not just made up!
2015 MB i7 to i9 MB doesn't increase anything times 4.
i5 2015 13" MBP to i9 2018 15" MBP. 3x the cores, higher IPC, higher frequency, faster memory, faster SSD. It adds up, and for this class of process a 4x improvement is totally reasonable.
How long have you been working on that task and waited an hour? The wasted labour cost might have bought you a dedicated compiling rack 2 weeks in.
I don't know how the hell you work, but I don't just kick off a process and let it run while I sit still at my desk waiting for it to complete :) It just involves working to a slightly different rhythm, and the ability to iterate a bit faster makes that nicer for me, at minimal cost.
Anyway… wasn't the point that "developers don't need faster machines?" I think buying a "dedicated compiling rack" would count!
How long could you have rented cloud ressources to bring that task down to close to instant for the cost of a i9 MB?
No idea, but in the long term, more than it costs to buy a new development machine. Plus this way I don't have to fanny around with copying assets back and forward, remoting in to visualise things, setting up a server or whatever. And the new laptop makes everything a little bit faster and more enjoyable to use. The price of the machine is pretty marginal for a tool I use in excess of 40 hours a week.
Beware if you fully utilise a laptop like you describe shouldn't it become useless for everything else while doing that?
Nah, it's fine generally. Everything's just a bit slower until it's done.
Used to working diff company with server farms for compiling. Even with the servers, compiling the 26G software pkg took 4 hours. When it is high noon and everyone was using it. I have seen compile jobs can last 8+ hours. There a few times that by the time compile is done, I have completely context switch out and forgot what I need to debug.
No matter where I was, be it at home, in a computer lab, presenting my work to peers or my supervisor, or outdoors in a field, I had the same tools, same large dataset of raw h.264 video streams, same hardware, same everything, without needing to rely on streaming data to and from some server on the internet, or worry about keeping my work and software in sync across multiple machines. I could tweak my algorithm parameters in-field and I could continuously compile my huge 100-page latex sources for my dissertations from.. the beach :)
I think it's always important here to realise that people have different use cases and priorities for their equipment, and that there's no right or wrong answers. Some people are happy to fork out for a portable; others don't require that, and would rather have a fixed workstation with more power. Some developers are totally fine with 10-year-old kit, and some can benefit from newer stuff. I'm sure everybody evaluates their circumstances and comes to suitable conclusions for themselves!
It's a pity they are otherwise crappy for my work (I need a reliable keyboard, I do not want a "touch bar", I do want USB-A ports).
If your machine doesn't have quite enough RAM, it will swap and likely be unusable.
Once you have just enough it will fly, and adding more RAM will make little difference.
I can't imagine the OP's aged stack is so low on RAM that he puts up with swapping.
in 2018 a mobile i9 had 6cores/12threads, bost of around 4.8 (so lets be reasonable, thermals might let us keep 3.6).
For a super optimized parallel load you could totally see more than 2x speed up.
But yeah... why do that on your laptop?
Not on a 13" MBP, it didn't. Source: there's one on my desk.
Not everybody needs a laptop, or a super powerful development machine. But if you want to process some stuff nice and quickly, while not being tied to any physical location, it's a totally reasonable solution.
The Core 2 Duo/Quad on LGA775 is the last revision of the Intel Management Engine (ME) that can be completely removed. The me_cleaner script recently added the ability to clean this platform.
A Q9650 quad-core CPU is the best performance that can be reached on this board. I have two and I have run me_cleaner on both. I do my finances on the one that runs OpenBSD.
Firewalls are great, and you should have one, but you have to constantly watch and understand everything coming in and out of it. Works ok as a full time job, terrible when you have other things to do.
If you're using a lot of virtual machines, sure. If you're working on something that's inherently RAM-hungry like video processing, sure. If you're working against a local database server, maybe. If you're using something like IntelliJ or ReSharper (but not necessarily Visual Studio), then, <sigh>, yeah, I guess.
If you're doing Web development, OTOH, it's probably better if you not have much RAM. If front-end, because a significant percentage of your users will be using low-RAM devices like smartphones and Chromebooks, and you shouldn't need any more RAM than they do. If back-end, because the production servers will (hopefully) be handling a lot more load than what you're doing in testing, so if you get too comfortable with treating RAM as a plentiful resource in development, that's going to be a recipe for scalability problems.
I do mostly Go, and yeah, there it doesn't matter as much, but you should see some of the build times on these services. There isn't even a big scary monolith left in our architecture (besides a frontend in node).
Oh, and let me not forget minikube.
Hell, I did a lot of (hobby, not work) development on an eee PC netbook a few years ago. Besides the discomfort that a small screen and sub-normal keyboard brings, it was a reasonable experience. I didn't have to run slack then though.
Obviously it depends on what you're doing though. Processing data? Running a ton of tools all at once? Differing workflows and requirements have different hardware needs.
I've sat down and enumerated the things I do daily on my computer versus what I did back in ~2000. Besides streaming (youtube, netflix and spotify basically), its pretty uncommon that I do anything that I couldn't or didn't do back then. The performance of these things, now, seems about the same anecdotally. Maybe it was a little slower then, but not so much slower compared to the hardware performance difference. It makes me sad.
Also, as I said in other comments, I once developed hobby projects on a netbook. I of course ran a minimal system and didn't run resource hogs like slack. I'm currently using a cheap laptop running a minimal system (but unfortunately I do need to use slack, chrome, docker for work). They run fine.
I think developers or companies have decided that developer time is more important than performance and resource use of their products, punting the cost of that onto their customers. If my work didn't require it, I would definitely switch to more resource conscious tools and I'd be a bit happier. Oh well.
I used to be able to open 3 Twitch streams in 720/1080p back in 2010 on a dual core Athlon X2 5000.
These days, if I open 2 HD streams in Firefox on a 4.2 Ghz quad-core 4670k, the system essentially freezes - the browser becomes unusable and both streams lag. Thank god for streamlink that lets you bypass the browser interface and view the streams in VLC or MPV.
Not to mention Electron-based apps using 600-800MB for a chat program with some light jpeg usage.
Developers' blatant disregard the the use of user's system resources is insane. It seems that regardless of hardware improvements, the modern developer only targets "acceptable" levels of performance, leaving power users frustrated.
It doesn't seem as easy to switch Windows to a lighter desktop environment.
Granted, using XP today is not recommended for other reasons.
"Ram is cheap"
and:
"The maximum ram you can get is 8-16G"
Developers who are making electron applications (not that electron is the primary cause, it's just a correlation I see often) constantly consider that "ram is cheap" for their users and thus do not pay attention to memory consumption like they should.
This means that you're right in a way; vim is good enough for most people and a decent terminal emulator is going to cost you much less than 100mb of ram.
However; slack is consuming 2GiB on my machine, Skype for business is using 500MiB, Outlook @ 600MiB. I use safari and not chrome (safari is @800MiB with too many tabs open) but if I were using chrome I could be using many multiples of gigabytes.
If everyone thinks their program is worth 1GiB of ram or more then your machines become very limited in what can be backgrounded. You might as-well run Android/iOS if you're running with 1G of ram with todays application/web ecosystem.
The thing is; I am quite conservative with memory usage and I'm still quite sure I wouldn't be able to work on anything with 8GiB or less.
( I mean, I just checked and I'm using 15G of memory: https://i.imgur.com/xd6eB91.png )
So it's not Electron, but it's what Electron enables.
That said, large companies using Electron is what I don't get. You can't expect me to believe Slack doesn't have the resources to create an actual app for their product.
Also they might have started in electron and now it's hard to move away from it.
You can relate if you ever had to setup a JS taskrunner/webpack from scratch. If you don't do it regularly, expect to spend 2-3 hours going through documentation and lots of outdated StackOverflow posts.
JS is easy as long as you stay within the constraints of whatever scaffolding you're using, if you need anything outside of that or need to upgrade your stack you need to know a lot of little things. "Best practices" move fast in JS, and projects die fast too.
Our companies customized eclipse on the other hand hogs 8GB ram when doing nothing, needs 2 minutes to start, and is sluggish in general. It's our course written in Java, which is much closer to native than electron, but still they wasted resources everywhere they could.
You can't run a compile on a 8GB ram machine, it will start swapping to hard disk.
Sublime doesn't have all the features, notepad ++ neither, and I just don't like vim style editing.
That leaves vscode.
I’ve tried replacing slack with the wee-slack plugin for weechat but, while it works it’s far from a fully working solution and I still need to spin up a slack client sometimes.
1) 4GB—let alone 1GB—is already cramped with just Slack and any one of your usual bloated shitware issue trackers/wanky PM toyboxes (Jira, Asana) open in a tab or two, plus the usual few tabs of DDG/Google, Stack Overflow, some docs, et c. That's before any actual code-writing tools enter the picture. The basic suite of tools to just be working at all in almost any role is just barely not-painful to use on 4GB. Worst case you're in an agency and have all your tools, plus several duplicates for the same purpose for a client or three, and so on, all open. Yes, it's because all these tools are terrible and eat like 20x the RAM they have any right to and even that's generous, but I still have to use them.
2) Better hope you don't need any design tools at all. (Sketch, say) if you're trying to get by on 4GB or less for everything, unless you like only having one thing open at a time or dealing with UI sluggishness I guess.
3) Docker(-compose) or minikube or whatever? Service dependencies, local mock services? Running test suites? Without a strong CPU and 16GB you'll see slowdown.
4) A fan of any of the fancier webmail clients, like recent GMails or Inbox or Outlook or whatever? I'm not and just keep the Basic HTML version of Gmail open because its full-page loads are faster than the "speedy" AJAX garbage on those, but if you are into that sort of thing take a look at their memory use some time.
FWIW I think almost all the tools surrounding and supporting development these days are god-awful resource hogs that somehow still manage not to be very good and think 1GB absolutely should be enough memory to get by doing node/ruby/php dev, but I still have to work with that junk, and 8GB's the bare minimum to do that without hitting swap constantly, IME, and even with that you've gotta be careful. 16GB's much more comfortable, especially if you sometimes have to do things other that just Web dev.
I think I could manage to have less RAM (I frequently code on my chromebook with 2GB RAM). My theory is that the ram expands to the amount available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
Jira's not as bad as Asana but depending on the set-up it can be pretty close. Then there's Invision, et c which are much lighter than those but still pretty damn heavy, if you're trying to get by on 4GB or less. And/or maybe you've got Outlook and Teams and all that. And that's just the communication & collab tools, not even any of the stuff to produce actual work output. Temporarily having to use a 4GB machine with that kind of workflow is why I'm now permanently on Basic HTML for Gmail—it loads fast enough I can close it, and uses so little memory there's no reason to. I couldn't spare the 300+MB for Inbox or whatever with all that other junk open, and besides, Basic HTML's much faster.
If you're not seeing performance issues in your developer machine, you'll hardly see a developer running on 2GB of RAM.
I don't think I'd enjoy the experience of developing on that machine!
If I wasn't running on a Mac at work I could comfortably use containers without the overhead of another VM.
Looking forward to putting an inexpensive linux workstation together when this Mac eventually bites the dust.
The large Rails app I work on can eat up 500mb RAM easily. The webpack dev server I'm running to compile the Angular frontend for said Rails app is taking another 500mb. Visual Studio Code (easily the best TypeScript editor) is using over a gig of RAM all by itself.
A good IDE like PhpStorm is going to use 1-2GB.
A browser will consume 1GB+. Want multiple browsers for testing? Add another few gigs.
Most devs now use a VM or container with PHP, MySQL, etc running inside it. Add at least 1GB, maybe 2GB.
You probably need Slack or HipChat running. 0.5GB to 1GB.
A mail client. 256MB+.
Your company probably has Office 365, so you'll need Outlook. 1GB+.
The 4G isn't for building or running code, it's for tons of browser tabs open with documentation. I routinely have >10 tabs open, and that's quite likely to cause swapping on 1G RAM.
Sure, I could slim everything down by running a tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment or configuring my browser to unload older tabs (or close and reopen with bookmarks), but that takes extra time, and if time is money, that money is better spent on a few extra gigs of RAM.
Sure, there is a lot of development that can still be done with 1GB RAM, but you're going to run into limitations and it is far from "perfect"
I have a relatively minimalist Linux environment by today's standards (I use Emacs, Firefox with about 10 tabs, the Signal client, a few terminals and a lightweight WM) and I already use 1.5GB of RAM at the moment. Firefox alone uses 408M of RES, the Signal app almost as much (!) while my Emacs with dozens of buffers uses "only" 130MB. How times change. The rest is used by all sorts of system processes and minor daemons.
So basically I'd be fine with 1GB if it wasn't for the bloat that's modern web-based development. These days I'd say that 4GB is a more reasonable baseline.
The last PHP app I was developing was running in the same mode as the whole company's infrastructure was developed and running - one puppetized Vagrant VM for the code and one for mysql, and sometimes a few more for other services.
Sure, even if you just want to abstract the stuff away from your host machine you could reconfigure stuff to run on one VM - but that's again diverging from production. And in the grand scheme of things we were working on several different vm types a lot more than only on this PHP app...
No, a machine with 1GB RAM is not perfect. If you are a frontend developer coding in node. And if you are not, you might need a browser for Stack Overflow; and you might need Docker or vagrant for virtualization.
And, you may also want an Electron-based editor, such as Atom or VS Code.
Even 4GB is hardly ideal. 8GB is probably where it starts getting comfortable.
Development machine does not need to have the constraints of a testing machine; it's counterproductive.
In any case, "web bloat" is relative to the target users and target devices. It's one thing to target cheap Android phones in India; it's quite another to target laptops of a SF-based startup. In the second case, web bloat is negligible.
What about, relative to how many resources should be required for whatever tasks the software needs to perform?
Just because I have a lot of ram doesn't mean I want Slack to use it all. I'd rather give that space to the OS for file caching and such.
Every morning every Dev in our shop no matter the project is going to run "mvn clean compile -U"
Sure you can split the large projects up. Just get some time from your PM.. next quarter.... :)
If you have a few thousand tests at a couple milliseconds apiece (really really easy to do even in a midsized project) you’re getting above that 1 minute range. Shaving 40% off with a faster computer stops people from task switching while testing.
Task switching pretty much doubles your test cycle because you never switch back at the precise moment the tests are done (we are developers. We always underestimate everything by a factor of 2).
Even on a top of the line macbook pro that shit chugged.
And the laptop would get HOT.
If you were running native Linux it should be a lot faster.
There's simply a more sharply defined distinction between applications and windows. Cmd-Tab is for application switching.
if the user wants to move to a terminal window they have open in the background, which key combination do they press? alt+tab or alt+backtick? they have to stop and actively think about which current window is highlighted. is it the browser? or another terminal? this completely kills the action fluency of a keyboard shortcut.
This is generally a non-issue, but even if you are getting tripped up consistently, the OS literally tells you at all times what application currently has focus