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Comment by krat0sprakhar | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity, what do you do with 16GB of RAM? I'm running OS X 10.10 on 4GB Macbook Air and I have faced no issues whatsoever. My general usage includes Chrome with ~20 tabs open, a Vagrant VM, terminal and text editor.

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Multiple VMs. You use aboug 3G per VM, + the OSX kernel and RAM allocation quickly amounts to close to 3-4GB. I can't work with less than 8G, and 16G makes it about bearable.

When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves battery a LOT. Was able to run 11" Air with 19 tabs on Safari and with vim (on iTerm). 2hrs later still had 95% battery left.

> When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves battery a LOT.

Were you comparing Safari with 0 extensions vs. Chrome with 0 extensions? Or does each have a different extension load?

I will often fall back to Safari if a page doesn't render properly in Chrome, but that's because I installed a bunch of extensions on Chrome and have consciously left Safari pure as the driven snow. It's a different problem domain, but I know certain extensions can use resources in surprising ways.

One factor is that I believe chrome has flash by default, and Safari does not

It's not just that. I see nearly 2x better battery life using Safari over Chrome on a 15" rMBP, and I have plugins turned off (click to play). It just uses a lot less CPU, full stop. I don't know what the real difference is, but I suspect Safari just does a better job of idling than Chrome does.

My semi-verified guess is that a lot of the difference is CPU usage when two-finger scrolling on large pages. I just tried it on this page with OSX 10.9 and a 15" Mac Pro, monitoring with Activity Monitor and Coconut Battery while bouncing rapidly up and down.

Chrome burns 90% of a CPU on one thread, and another 40% on another. Coconut reports about 32 Watts used. Safari maxes at about 12% plus 8%, and tops at about 15 Watts. Base usage on this machine with the current screen brightness and applications that happen to be open is 10-12 Watts. I get approximately the same results with Incognito mode, which suggests the problem is core Chrome rather than add-ons.

When you click the battery dropdown on the top right, Chrome is consistently listed as an "Apps Using Significant Energy". On previous releases of OS X I also noticed that by default it would use my dedicated GPU at all times, whereas Safari would not (not sure if this is still true).

This is no longer true, but it still does request the dGPU on certain pages, such as the Chrome Web Store.

What's especially obnoxious about that behavior is that if you disable the dGPU, it works just fine. So what's the point?

Also, one would expect Chrome's own Web Store to work well in Chrome... but Google's attitude toward long-standing bugs is anything but exemplary.

I found 8GB a bit pokey, 16GB much better. Generally have open Firefox, Chrome, Sublime, Photoshop, Illustrator, an IE testing VM, Terminal running a couple of web app servers, Spotify and maybe another Windows VM with Visual Studio and Firefox (recent project has involved some .NET). I recognise that my workflow would be a bit RAM heavy though.

I run on 16GB. The thing is, it always seems to use up the amount of RAM you have. I don't have much open (XCode, Sketch, Chrome), but it's still using 15.36GB. That's including 720MB XCode, and 325MB Sketch. It's storing 9GB for apps and 4.8GB for file storage.

Generally, this just makes things that bit faster. The more you can store in RAM (even trivial things), the better. I've never had any slow downs, and don't have to worry about opening Photoshop and Illustrator along with XCode, Sketch and 20 Chrome tabs.

I'm not too familiar with the internals of OSX, but I would be very surprised if that ram is actually really used. More than likely, it's just caching of things already on the harddrive. If you have a old fashioned mechanical drive it makes a lot of sense, but with modern SSDs, I doubt you'll feel it much.

Unless you're a true poweruser, no one really needs more than 8gb by todays standards. I have 32gb because I maintain and develop 4 different codebases each with their own setup in different VMs. If I didn't do that, I could manage with 8gb just fine.

I have a 2013 Air with 8 GB RAM, and there's no way I'd ever consider running Yosemite with less.

Chrome with 300 tabs open. Some VMware with several VMs (I'm usually doing simulated network stuff).

>> "Chrome with 300 tabs open."

Why? Genuinely curious why anyone would ever need that many tabs open. Why can't you use bookmarks/reading list? It doesn't seem possible that you would be actively using all of those regularly enough to need them all open.

Garbage Collector for tabs: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-garbage-collec...

It's not that they use them all, just as you work you keep adding more tabs and there's no GC for tabs.

Of course but why not close of bookmark the ones you're done with (i.e. not going to use for the next several hours)?

It's not really work IMO, as another commenter claims (assuming he/she wasn't being sarcastic, which is entirely possible). If you have the pinboard.in extension, it's a simple ⌘-D to save.

That sounds like work.

Every now and then I carry out my own manual garbage collection of tabs: iterate through, copy URL of any I don't really need right now, collect the URLs in a text file somewhere. I usually end up losing the text file but no disaster ensues.

I'm currently running with 19 tabs open. Any more than that and it becomes too difficult to identify them. Ideally, I try to trim it down to about 10 when I can. How anyone can be even remotely productive with 300 open is beyond me.

I've found Evernote's web clipper to be a good replacement for that same process.

Must be the SSD then, because my MBP was a drag with only 4GB (even on 10.8)

Now, 16GB, that's very good

I feel it's definitely the SSD. In the summer of 2012 I purchased a MacBook Air with SSD and it always felt a bit more snappy than a MacBook Pro purchased at work in the same summer. RAM was equal, so the difference was that the MacBook Pro was not packing an SSD.

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