
Ask HN: Our lead architect says 4GB is enough for a developer machine - insamniac
I work in an alleged data center, building enterprise Java applications. For remote work we&#x27;re &quot;upgrading&quot; to VDI clients with a single core and 4GB of RAM.  I posted on an intranet forum that this was insufficient, and the reply from our de facto Java guru was: &quot;..physical workstations at <i>sadplace</i> only have 4GB and that works fine for most developers. We have made a request for 6GB - that&#x27;s under review..&quot;<p>My reactionary response would be something like &quot;Dude, it&#x27;s 2016. Eclipse, Chrome, and WebLogic max me out&quot; (Yes, WebLogic, that says it all.)<p>Should I just leave this place ASAP, or has anyone had success in lobbying their company for better hardware? If so, can you give me some tips on how to pull it off?  Your tax dollars are involved!
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MalcolmDiggs
I'd recommend breaking down the time lost due to the slower machine, and
spelling out how that equates to dollars down the drain. Here's an example
(with arbitrary numbers):

"With a 16GB machine, it takes my test suite 5 minutes to run. With 4GB, that
suite runs in 20 minutes. I need to run it on average, 10 times a day. So by
giving me the 4GB machine, you're having me sit idle for an unnecessary 15
minutes, 10 times a day. So that's 2.5 hours per day that you're paying me to
spin around in my chair and surf HackerNews. That's X wasted dollars every
day, which is significantly more than the cost of the upgrade from 4GB to
16GB. So you'll save money by giving me a faster machine".

If there's a way to speak dollars-and-cents to the bureaucrats in your org,
then there's a better chance of them approving your request.

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Zelmor
Sounds like a shortsighted company led by sales people. If there is this
amount of penny-fucking at your company, maybe it is best to interview at
other places and leave asap.

Things will not get better, as management has costs to cut. Your work
equipment is one of those costs. If it was up to them, you'd be shoveling with
3 spoons instead of a shovel, since "it works for most", meaning "we only
assign shovels on a 1-1 basis so that we wouldn't need to spend bigger amount
now." What are your salary raise prospects at such a company?

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rt2016
Yikes, that's pretty low for local development work. If you were mostly doing
remote access to a more powerful development server that might work but for
doing anything more serious you'll want to consider at least 8GB. Chrome uses
a gig by itself so you're already down quite a bit. Most of my dev machines
have been 16GB minimum.

~~~
mattkrea
This. Around 2.8Ghz core and 16GB ram are standard for us. Occasionally we
have to settle for 8GB if that is what all that is available in Apple refurbs.

~~~
markbnj
I don't care about CPU speed very much, but yeah, 16GB at least for a dev
machine. You need something you can run a database on, perhaps an http server
+ framework, etc.

~~~
mattkrea
Virtual machines are a killer too. We are primarily web but end up doing more
than our fair share of legacy WinForm app updates and that requires a lot of
ram if you're going to have at least somewhat of a pleasant experience in VS
inside the VM.

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nness
So, hardware purchases for large organisations (and what I assume might be a
government agency or government vendor) seems to be driven more from strategic
sourcing relationships and cost as a priority, and actual technical
requirements second. Seldom do people go "here's what we need, lets cost it!"
More likely its a compromise between cost and service.

That being said, 4GB is stupidly low for a development machine and that should
be alarming for the development team (6GB is not much an improvement).

I would argue the "works fine for most developers" point. What works now (the
current state) is certainly not going to last. 4GB is already too low and it
is only going to get more difficult as the requirements increase (bloat is a
constant).

The conversation should be "what is the practical life of this hardware and do
we intend to upgrade when it runs out." You should think about performance
hits (in the people sense, not hardware sense) if these environments are
abandoned by your developers. All hardware purchases have an effective life
and what you've described is a purchase which will barely last another 12
months, imho.

~~~
insamniac
Yeah it's not a single company making the hardware decisions. Like most
government contract situations it's more akin to a 20 company gang bang at a
public facility using shared work space and hardware.

I don't even know where I'd begin to petition for a change. This was mostly
just my way of ranting somewhere I'd get support, since no one made a peep on
the internal comment I posted. I don't think most developers are fine with the
4GB situation. Those that are don't matter, and the others have likely just
been beaten into submission or don't want to be seen as fussy.

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lightlyused
"fine for most developers", sounds to me like the Java guru needs to provider
proof of that statement.

Gallup does surveys for businesses and one of the questions they ask is "Do
you have the right equipment to do your job".

[http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/26773/why-employees-
ne...](http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/26773/why-employees-need-right-
equipment.aspx)

If your workstation is slow, or you have to deal with OOM issues, and can't
get your work done, that is something that needs addressed not by guessing,
but my management doing their job and providing you with the right equipment
from the start.

If the company isn't willing to provide you the right equipment based on what
the employees think and not just on what one person says based on hearsay,
than I'd question if that is a good place to work.

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insamniac
Oh, I forgot to add: Single Core, 2666 Mhz.

I really wanted to ask if I could donate my old netbook and remote into that.

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chrisbennet
It's very easy for someone on the Internet to tell you to run away from
conditions like this. I'm not going to tell you that but consider this: the
world is full of places like that but it is also full of seriously _great_
places to work as well. Every minute you work at some crappy job is a minute
you could be working at someplace nice instead. When you start interviewing
for your next job, be sure to ask them about their development hardware. ;-)

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Spooky23
We deploy 2 cpu and 4 GB for office 2016 VDI users. That's tight for a
developer.

Unless you're offshore and your wasted time is not as valuable, that's a poor
VDI use case that doesn't make sense

Fight it with vendor recommendations.

[http://blogs.vmware.com/consulting/tag/vmware-view-
storage](http://blogs.vmware.com/consulting/tag/vmware-view-storage)

[http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/Server-Storage-
Sizing-G...](http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/Server-Storage-Sizing-Guide-
Windows-7-TN.pdf)

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cdvonstinkpot
I second what MalcomDiggs has said, but run some benchmarks on your home box
with all the memory. Find an amount at which performance increases level off,
& request a just amount based on hard data. If they don't respond after making
it perfectly clear as to what you need to do your job properly, then leave.
(Assuming you can easily get work elsewhere)

Maybe link this comments thread in your intranet post, a community like HN
expressing sane norms might help your case.

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stephengillie
You'd be surprised what a single, well-scheduled CPU can put up with. Don't
want to add too many and deal with CPU Ready, where the hypervisor is trying
to schedule all those cores on the host. Smaller VMs are easier to schedule
and thus have less opportunity to be forced into idleness.

But yeah you need twice that RAM, minimum.

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bjourne
That'll just lead to a dick-swinging contest if your resident Java guru
already said 4gb is enough. It's futile. There are many ways to reduce the
memory consumption of your desktop machine. Start with those.

~~~
throweway
Tldr: Put up and shut up

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davelnewton
Put your own RAM in.

I used to have to upgrade my own machines. For years. Monitors and RAM. I
haven't had a place that gave me anything less than 16G for years now, though.

~~~
stephengillie
It's VDI. Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure. Good luck accessing the
datacenter.

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dmarlow
I would expect this from a cost center vs profit center workplace. I have 24
GB on my W530, the more, the better...

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icedchai
Laughable. 4 gig was adequate in 2008, maybe.

~~~
wingerlang
This hits home. I'm working on a 2008 macbook that was (I guess) upgraded from
4gb to 8gb RAM when I bought it off of some guy.

It works for me to develop on though. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

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thrwawy20160421
Run away

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throweway
Oh dear! Can you BYO laptop?

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throwawayXOXO
Run

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detaro
Well, if it really is a VDI client and not used for more then the specs would
be fine, not much happening locally that would need more.

But then you wouldn't be running Eclipse, Chrome and WebLogic locally on them,
so that's probably not the case? And even Chrome alone can easily eat more
than 4 GB, so that's kinda laughable for any kind of dev work.

~~~
throweway
Point?

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detaro
Trying to understand why OP talks about VDI clients (basically dumb
terminals), but then complains that they don't have enough RAM to run apps
locally.

~~~
throweway
Good question. I misread the op the first time. So yeah whats the advantage of
stuffing more on the thin client. Unless he is also using the thin client to
run stuff he cant run remotely.

~~~
insamniac
Just a terminology mistake on my part. I don't know what to call the
virtualized OS I'm remoting into. We just refer to it as VDI, but that's more
general.

What's the term for the instance I connect to? I guess I should have just
called it the VM. My VM only has 4GB of RAM and one core and I'm supposed to
write and test (deploy) decent sized applications on it.

~~~
throweway
Run!

