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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

What workload do you do that 16GB isn't enough? Compiling large database backed .NET projects and Rust projects and AAA gaming all fit fine in 16GB

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I regularly see my thinkpad exceed 20 GB with vscode, YouTube music, and docker hosting a frontend, backend, and simulated load.

I've been sitting at 27 GB for the past two days with PyCharm open as well.

They are using as much memory as they can because it is available. Chrome is notorious for this. That is not a valid gauge for how much memory is necessary or even useful.

How about the system freezing? Vscode compiling a flutter project with an Android Emulator open. Firefox with MS Teams, Jura etc, no tab hoarding. Sometimes chrome is open as well. Upgraded to 32gb and the freezes are gone.

16gb is not enough anymore for even such a modest workload.

Electron is never modest. It's an incredible resource hog. Memory has become too cheap, people should think instead of just waste resources. The next generations will need to use an abacus again if this stupidity goes on.

I'm using 18GB on Pop_OS right now and often use more. The main contributors are browser tabs and VS Code. If I closed out the projects I'm not actively working on right now and hunted down anything hogging RAM, I could get back under 16GB, but the nice thing about having 32GB is I almost never have to do that.

I'm pretty sure browsers automatically expand their in-memory cache to fill the available space, things would probably work with less.

I mean, you're probably right to an extent, but I did actually have to close stuff periodically on my old laptop with 16GB of RAM.

My dev workflows on Manjaro with KDE typically required ~18GB RAM (VSC, nodejs, rust, elixir, mongodb, redis, docker, db mgmt tool, browser, mail client, Slack, etc).

On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.

I think my example is extremely average and common.

Looking at docs in a browser

Virtualization is one that I frequently do. Running a VM to test out programs (especially to test out Windows compat, or macOS if you're feeling up to the challenge). 16GB can barely run an additional VM, and if you have 30-40 FF tabs open, an IDE, and so on, then running with just 16GB of memory becomes very restrictive. Allocating 8GB to the (one) VM would leave you with 8 for the host OS, of which 2GB is going to be used by the kernel/WM, and leaves only 6GB to develop with.

> What workload do you do that 16GB isn't enough?

Run a C++ IDE on a medium-large codebase and you can very quickly run out of RAM.

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