

Every Developer Deserves More Memory - BrandonWatson
http://www.manyniches.com/developers/every-developer-deserves-more-memory/

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btilly
Every developer would like and enjoy more memory. But if you're developing
applications for normal folks, it is very important that you experience what
life is like on a more limited machine.

That is why, more often than not, I've deliberately worked with hardware that
was a generation or two behind the latest and greatest. Yes, it is a PITA.
Yes, I'd enjoy the bright and shiny. But it keeps me honest about what is
going to work in the wild.

~~~
pmjordan
There's definitely some truth to that, but I think you'd be better off
switching to an older machine (or deliberately taking out RAM/underclocking
the CPU) occasionally. The productivity gains from working with decent
hardware are worth it.

~~~
silvestrov
You really need 2 computers: one development machine that is the latest and
greatest (incl. Intel SSD), and one old slow grandmom computer that shows how
slow the 1/4 slowest customer computers are.

You can't combine it into a single computer, because even if it is only 80% of
the latest and greatest, it is still way faster than grandmom, thus not
representative of your customer base.

~~~
teej
The best way to find out how a normal person drives a car is to put a normal
person in the drivers seat. Watching usertesting.com videos has shown me how
cluttered and slow a normal person's computer can be. It also showed me the
interesting ways those people interact with their clunkers.

Instead of having a second crippled computer for testing, I would rather use
tools like Charles (<http://www.charlesproxy.com/>) to cripple my computer in
a tweakable and consistent way.

This way I can develop, optimize for certain controlled conditions on the same
machine, and verify my optimizations with real people.

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cschneid
Best choice was to get the 16gb of ram in my Mac Pro. It's epic working with
that kind of hardware behind you. I'm running a Windows VM, all my servers are
up constantly, dozen programs, etc. And still have 4.25 gb free for the sweet
sweet caching.

~~~
nickyp
Hear, Hear! Also went to 20Gb (up from 8Gb) on the Mac Pro in the summer. Best
300$ I ever spent on hardware upgrades. Never close apps anymore, and never
experience a swapstorm anymore.

Only one very, very big drawback: you'll want that much RAM in every system
you use afterwards. I guarantee it: I just put back the screws on my laptop 10
minutes ago ;-)

~~~
stuff4ben
Dang and I thought the 3GB I have on my P4 3Ghz desktop circa 2005 was awesome
</sarcasm>. Although I can't complain, I can still run the latest Ubuntu, an
XP VM for Outlook and the occasional Word doc, Eclipse and a memory hungry
Weblogic/ATG setup. free -m reports I'm only using just over half of that 3GB
so I'm doing pretty good. To be on a MacPro with 20GB of RAM...sigh...

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param
How soon before we see this meme evolving to "Every developer deserves more
SSDs"?

~~~
codexon
How soon before we see this meme evolving to "Every developer deserves more L1
Cache"?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Well, since the speed of a SRAM cache depends mostly on it's size, I predict
that craze to die pretty much instantly when they grow big enough that
pipelining cannot mask the increased latency anymore and performance begins to
suffer.

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vicaya
Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my brain with more and faster memory as well.

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antirez
I should stop to continue to live with 2GB I guess. can I install any kind of
DDR2 SDRAM in my macbook, right? I hope I don't need to get super overpriced
Apple RAM.

~~~
cracki
not any RAM modules, but SO-DIMMs. they're about half as long as what you'd
plug into a normal desktop PC.

~~~
pmjordan
Yep, and newer MacBooks actually use DDR3 rather than DDR2 memory. 'About my
mac' will tell you what kind to get.

~~~
BrandonWatson
And I have DDR3 here at DevDays for those with those shiny, pretty MBPs. :)

~~~
antirez
thanks to all, mine are DDR2 accordingly to about my mac.

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mhd
Every developer who creates desktop apps should work with a rather low spec
machine for a while, maybe even for a whole day per week.

Moore's law yadda yadda, but while it's great that we don't have to include
inline assembly anymore, some of the waste we're seeing currently is just
abysmal.

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jfager
So... why are you doing this? Nice gestures are nice, but this one seems
really expensive. What's the payoff for Microsoft? Simply a goodwill play?

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lyime
Brandon, You are a great man. +infinity karma for you.

