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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Blows my mind, I do most of the same on a 2013 MacBook Air with only 8GB RAM. I’ve never had a perf hiccup unless I try video editing or gaming. But I just don’t really have a want to do those things, hence why I’m still getting by on this thing. I was going to upgrade once for the hell of it but all the keyboard issues kept me seated.

I expected you to say you did something with graphics/media. I guess the VMs could be the difference. I don’t use. But I have 100 chrome tabs open at most times lol.

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All these things work with 8GB RAM. macOS uses all available RAM aggressively, so if you have 32GB RAM it will appear as what you are doing requires 32GB RAM, which is not the case.

No they don't. It starts compressing pages when the memory pressure goes up and then it starts running like dog shit.

On my machine, if it goes more than 5G into swap it starts to become less responsive.

It really depends on your usage patterns. VM abusers and people who need to keep an eye on more than one project at the same time (as in multiple IDEs) can't do with 16 Gb.

And please don't tell me to start closing software, I'm willing to pay for more ram to have everything handy. Except... I can't.

Right now I have 6GB for VMs (for ~12 docker containers) and 8GB for various IDEs and editors. Probably typical for those on my development team. Surprisingly Chrome isn't even the top ten for memory footprint on my laptop.

So far 16GB has been fine on this 2017 MacBook. Wouldn't turn down 32 though :-)

You have reduced performance, you're just accustomed to it.

Could be true. But I get instant feedback from all apps, so what's the measure of "reduced performance" that would matter? I'm actually curious, if nothing lags, would I notice a difference by upgrading?

My view into your comment is that you think I'm used to the lag. That's not the case. It's not my only device just my only Apple laptop. My newest device, a iPhone 12 Pro, is an upgrade from my 6s that I surely noticed and knew I would. I had been frustrated by the 6s for a while but held out for 5G.

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