
Ask HN: How much RAM do you have? Think you need more? - rahilsondhi
I have 8 GB RAM on my 2010 MacBook Pro. With Vagrant running, I frequently get under 300 MB of available RAM. Do I need 16 GB?<p>How much do you have and do you think you need more?
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TheSwordsman
It depends on my system. Both my work MacBook Pro and personal MacBook Air
have 8GB of RAM. There have been times where I've been 10GB in to swap, and
the performance of the system makes me think I'm actively paging.

However, for most cases on my work/personal laptop the 8GB of RAM is plenty.

On my desktop PC, however, I have 12GB of RAM. I use this primarily for
gaming, and I have definitely used 8+ GB on this box. The one time,
admittedly, Windows Update was using about 9GB of RAM for no reason. But I
have had games get up above 3GB in usage.

Also, are you sure your RAM is unavailable and not just used for disk cache or
something?

~~~
rahilsondhi
How do I check if my RAM is being used as disk cache? Is that known as "swap"?
I'm using the FreeMemory app which tells me that 371 MB is free right now.

I have a 120 GB SSD with 8 GB free.

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taylorbuley
Are you sure you need so much memory allocated to VMs? Worth mentioning is
this blurb from Vagrant's old docs
([http://docs-v1.vagrantup.com/v1/docs/base_boxes.html](http://docs-v1.vagrantup.com/v1/docs/base_boxes.html)):

 _Make sure the default memory allocation is not too high. Most people don’t
want to download a box to find it using 1 GB of RAM. We typically set it at
360 MB to start, since that is the size of most small slices._

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fr0stycr4ck
I use 8gb on my mid 2010 MacBook Pro and find that it needs to be rebooted
every so often to clear the memory. Since Lion OS X likes to hog all the RAM
for some reason.

~~~
conductor
Using available RAM is good, not bad. Why do you have those 8 GBs of RAM if
you want your system to starve (read: use more _slow_ HDD) and use the half of
it? It's OK when OSes use all the RAM for caches and buffers, they are smart
enough to invalidate them (or move to the SWAP) if some application needs more
memory.

~~~
fr0stycr4ck
After a program terminates the RAM is returned to OS X but it will not allow
other applications use any of it. It is a bug with their virtual memory. It
will say there are gigabytes of inactive memory but continue to use a swap and
not allocate it.

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hhandoko
16GB - the maximum supported on my current hardware. Ideally I'd like 32GB.

I develop SharePoint solutions on a two-VM configuration locally (DC - 1GB,
and app server - 8GB), both off a second drive (SSD). RAM utilisation are
always ~90%.

Note: When the VMs are off, it hovers around 6GB usage. Each instances of
Visual Studio 2012 I run adds an extra 500MB - 1GB to overall usage.

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agibsonccc
I tend to use most of my RAM and I have 16GB. I tend to do a lot of
dataset/number crunching and have a few different services running at once.

I tend to see that as an extreme case though. For everyday web dev 8GB seems
more than sufficient. I wouldn't say it's a requirement, but if you can opt
for it you might as well. RAM is cheap.

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dagw
I have 4 GB on my macbook air that I use for traveling, web surfing and
hacking various side projects and never run into problems. I have 16 GB on my
'big' laptop that I use for serious work doing data transformation and
analysis and I often wish I had 32 GB.

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andrewryno
4 GB on my Macbook Air. It's more than enough usually, but today I was running
my 512 MB Vagrant VM and many Python processes running (workers), which
consumed about ~3 GB of memory alone and helped bring my laptop to a crawl. So
having maybe 6 GB would be great.

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venomsnake
12 but shooting at 32 on the next build (top of the current mobo).

You can never have enough RAM as a developer. I just hate closing any kinds of
applications and try to restart only on patch Tuesday ...

And with RAM so cheap there is no excuse not to max it to what your MB
supports.

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chilicuil
WTF you do with your RAM?, What you used to do when there were not machine
with more that 4GB?, I've a machine with 4GB ram and I feel me in the heaven,
most of the time I'm under 2GB usage.., using Ubuntu 12.04 here

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eggestad
I put in 32GB last time and now I have enough, meaning the machine almost
always have RAM to spare, but I do have a usage > 16GB generally.

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aroch
I have 64GB in my hackintosh, I was originally planning on 32GB but for some
reason Amazon sent me two sets of 32 so who am I to complain?

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tagabek
16GB on my late 2011 MacBook Pro. I rarely go below 8 GB, and I love the
freedom of having more than enough. I would highly recommend it!

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bayesianhorse
I can't speak for Macs, but I am very pleased with my 16Gb setup. I probably
almost never use it all, but I do get above 8 Gb.

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gee_totes
I have 3 GB of ram in my Thinkpad T60 and that seems to handle about
everything I need to do. Why would I need more?

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junto
I have 16GB in my Asus, but I'm running Windows and Visual Studio 2012 needs
it all!

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jamesjguthrie
I have 4 GB in my 2012 Mac Mini and it is definitely not enough!

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AsmMAn
Is there some non-Mac user here also to me?

