Developers: how much memory do you need?

in #ram4 years ago

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I've been experimenting with various amounts of memory from 8 to 128 GB with both Windows and MacOS. While 8 GB of RAM is only enough for light tasks in the browser - 16 GB is pretty much the minimum for work.

Since I'm working with Web, API and Mobile applications, I want to quicly jump through them on-the-fly while developing. I'm also using Photoshop once in a while to edit various assets for applications. Here I think 32 GB is mandatory, unless you don't need great performance and in the same time want to reduce your SSD life-time with Memory Caching to disk.

While also running both Windows and Linux VMs to test native applications for those platforms 64 GB begins to be just enough and I saw OS was swapping a lot to the disk.

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While also running 2 VMs (each with 16 GB memory) - 128 GB starting to be just enough...

Are you heavily multi-task'ink? How much RAM do you have? Would be awesome to hear about your workflow.

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No matter how much RAM you have, your system will end up using it all, especially Mac 😊 But for my workflow, I have laptop with 8GB quite ok for light work, desktop could use more ram though. I do multi task a lot so like 64GB I suspect enough without any VMs. I don't do those, I rather use cloud VMs.