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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, I'm utterly baffled by all the people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user.

The only situation I ever ran into where it was a problem was in trying to run multiple VM's at once.

Otherwise it's just a non-issue. Programs often reserve a lot more memory than they actually use (zero hit in performance) so memory stats are misleading, and the OS is really good at swapping memory not touched in a while to the SSD without you noticing.

Yes, sometimes it takes a couple seconds to switch to a tab I haven't touched in Chrome in days because it's got to swap it back in from the SSD. Who cares?

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> people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user

I'm not claiming anything of the sort.

My point is that memory consumption seems to be greatly reduced in Big Sur, and that might make 8GB machines much better to use than before. All of my testing is on Intel machines. It's not exclusively an M1 phenomenon.

I would still recommend 16GB to anyone, and if the extra $200 was a factor, I would recommend that they buy last year's Intel with 16GB of RAM.

> I'm not claiming anything of the sort.

You kind of did:

> (a) every 8GB Mac I've used in the past has been unusably slow

Personally, I stick to 16GB+ as well. Though my wife's Mac likely has 4GB since it's something like 8 years old and it runs just fine.

> Otherwise it's just a non-issue.

Nah, sorry, but you're wrong. I had to upgrade my laptop because I wanted to run Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA and an Android emulator on the same machine. Nothing else. This was not possible on 8GB ram.

So it's not like multiple VMs are needed and above scenario is pretty average for a common mobile developer (but still not an average user, I admit)

Second thing is, lots of games require 16 GB RAM. Maybe gamers are still not average users, I don't know.

> an Android emulator

Well, that's one (largish) VM.

Large? It uses 1.5GB of RAM on average. Common Windows VM uses 6GB if you want it to be able to run a common application on it.

For me with 16GB in an MBP, there is currently 20.5GB used + swap, and I haven't even started Firefox today, that would add another ~6GB or so.

Usually if I'm running Safari, Firefox and my 4GB Linux VM, that's 16-18GB used up in those. At the moment I have a few other things open, PDF viewer, Word, iTerms, Emacs etc, but nothing huge.

Most of the time this level of usage is ok, but I've had times where I've had to wait 30+ seconds for the UI to respond at all (even the Dock or switching workspaces) and wondered if the system had crashed.

For that reason I'm generally waiting for the next 32GB model before committing, that's assuming I stick with Apple instead of switching back to Linux (which I used for ~20 years before trying the MBP).

> Programs often reserve a lot more memory than they actually use (zero hit in performance) so memory stats are misleading, and the OS is really good at swapping memory not touched in a while to the SSD without you noticing.

The stats are absolutely reliable because no physical memory page is allocated until it is actually used to store something. So allocating a large chunk of unused memory wouldn't show in the (physical) memory usage stat.

It's the never ending mystery of Hacker News- how do the commenters on here get their computers to run so slowly?

Docker and a few language servers can seriously drag your MacBook with 8GB RAM. Throw in another Android emulator...

> Seriously, I'm utterly baffled by all the people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user.

I may be not average, but just my Safari can take up >20GB—at least that's how much my "free" grows in MenuMeters when I quit it.

I pretty much daily have to do a closing round to not run out of my 24GiB. That’s all web browsers (Usually 100-200 tabs), vs code with some extensions and 2x4k display.

But what do you even mean "run out"? This is what I don't get.

If you have multiple browsers with hundreds of tabs, the majority of those tabs are probably swapped out to your SSD already.

With swapfiles and SSD's, physical memory is less and less relevant except when you're performing very specific computational tasks that actually require everything to be simultaneously in memory -- things like highly complex video effects rendering.

How do you measure "running out" of your 24 GiB? And what happens when you do "run out"?

As a human, when I have many tabs open, I observe that everything gets really slow. All applications get slow, but especially the browser.

So I put on my engineering hat and pull up Activity Monitor and further observe (a) high memory pressure, (b) high memory consumption attributed to Chrome or Firefox, (c) high levels of swap usage, (d) high levels of disk I/O attributed to kerneltask or nothing, depending on macOS version, which is the swapper task.

I close some tabs. I then observe that the problems go away.

Swap isn't a silver bullet, not even at 3Gbytes/sec. It is slow. I haven't even touched on GPU memory pressure which swaps back to sysram, which puts further pressure on disk swap.

It's slow.

I don't swap. You can do all your arguments about why I should if you want but yes, there are legit reasons not to and there is such a thing as running out of memory in 2020.

That's fine for you, but then it's disingenous for you to post your example without mentioning that.

It makes it unrepresentative and doesn't contribute anything useful to the conversation about memory requirements for normal operation.

It's the equivalent of having 50 stacks of paper documents & magazines sitting unorganized on your desk and complaining about not having space to work on.

A bigger desk is not the solution to this problem.

Some of us like our big loaded desks! No one really complained in this thread, just saying some of us will utilize a lot more memory than others.

If your tabs are swapped out to SSD, your computer feels incredibly _slow_. SSD are fast, yeah, but multiple orders of magnitude slower than the slowest RAM module.

You can run 4GB if you're fine with having most of your applications swapped out, but the experience will be excruciating.

Physical memory is still as relevant as it was 30 years ago. No offense but if you can't see the problem, you probably have never used a computer with enough RAM to fit everything in memory + have enough spare for file caching.

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