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Comment by jraedisch | Hacker News Reader

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

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I think the usual response is virtual hosts. On Mac, run windows or linux, on Windows, run linux, etc.

What do you use for that? What would be the best solution in 2015?

People sometimes seem to forget that development is not a synonym for web development. I use a laptop (Macbook Pro) to develop on a fairly large Unity game - I am currently sitting at 15.78GB/16GB used.

My laptop has 8GB, which is sufficient for most stuff. But, when I've got a lot of tabs open in the browser, if I open either Android Studio or one or more virtual machines, I start bumping into memory constraints.

In fact, Android Studio shocked me with how large it grows, even for very simple projects (which is all I've ever attempted thus far). And, I moved my Mac OS X and Solaris VMs over to my desktop machine, which has 16GB of RAM and more CPU cores, and I connect to them remotely. Running either would make my machine just sluggish enough to where I'd notice when scrolling or changing windows, etc.

Anyway, I've ruled this machine out, since it seems to max out at 8GB. Otherwise it is very nice, and I have gotten over my grudge at Dell (now that I've tried alternatives and found they're often even worse), so the XPS line is definitely a contender. But, my next laptop is going to have 16GB of RAM.

I'm guessing massive Java projects.

More memory is always good, but I'm pretty good with 8 for the Erlang and Ruby on Rails hacking that I do.

Virtual machines and especially smartphone/tablet emulators can really be voracious about ram. Also some ides with big projects/solutions

I run out of 8GB on a daily basis and curse the fact I don't have 32GB on my laptop. Often I need to run many different VMs running different Operating Systems, wireshark, pdfs, a latex editor, IDEs. If a task is taking a long time I will often switch projects while leaving the test running.

I would never buy another 8GB laptop as long as live.

It depends on what you are doing. Virtual machines IDEs(NetBeans,Eclipse,Visual Studio) MSSQL Browsers Communication software (Outlook and lync) Remote access software Password management software They all add up, and depending on how development is done, different programs could be required. On my work computer right now, no single program is using more than 400,000k of ram, but I'm using 13.8GB

Perhaps they're working with a large data set? I've 4gb on my office PC and was trying to create a CSV of millions of records and got an OutOfMemoryException from my app.

Chrome, IntelliJ IDEA, and 4 Java modules running simultaneously goes through 8gb without any hesitation. Hell, IntelliJ alone uses over 4gb sometimes.

> Hell, IntelliJ alone uses over 4gb sometimes.

And I thought my Eclipse install was a hog, weighing in at 500MB's through 1GB sometimes.

Yeah I don't remember Eclipse using this much ram, but then again, I never had such a big project indexed in Eclipse. Either way it's worth it, IntelliJ is amazing.

Virtual machines on any platform, Windows dev with Visual studio etc.

yes, its usually IDE's emulator's for me. Put xCode and Android Studio on there and run an emulator.

Also, I've had a similar experience running Visual Studio + SQL Server.

That iPhone Simulator is an insane memory hogger.

Virtualbox/vmware and java apps/IDEs probably.

virtual machines. For custom kernels, clusters, both, and other reasons. Having more than 1 vm running gets to be a pain with 8gigs or less.

Compiling webkit with 4gb of ram is... not ideal.

Visual Studio.

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