
Can We Put the 16GB “Pro” Myth to Rest? - imwally
https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355
======
smilekzs
The author listed quite a few apps then:

> A couple apps you won’t see on this list are Chrome and Slack

He explained we should:

> in my opinion you should boycott them until the developers learn how to
> write them to play nicer with memory

I stopped reading. Selection bias is selection bias, no matter how you try to
talk it out.

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notadoc
This is either clickbait or outright absurdity apologist nonsense.

I currently have 19GB of swapfiles sitting in /var/vm/ on a maxed out 2015
MBP.

The new MacBook Pro is not professional and it is underpowered. Accept it
already.

~~~
mhw
Would you mind indulging the audience (or me specifically) and outlining what
you're doing that uses 30Gb+ of RAM? Is this one application with huge data
sets, or many applications that must be run at the same time? Genuinely
interested...

~~~
adamnemecek
Not OP but this is mine right now and I'm not even doing anything that
intensive. [http://i.imgur.com/xYlR8Nw.png](http://i.imgur.com/xYlR8Nw.png)

Programmers stopped caring about memory not too long ago and this is the
result.

~~~
mhw
Wow. I thought Eclipse was memory hungry, and given the comments here I also
thought Sublime Text was frugal with memory compared with Atom.

For comparison, my development machine with a Docker environment and dev tools
running: [http://imgur.com/a/sic5M](http://imgur.com/a/sic5M)

~~~
pwinnski
I keep seeing Google Chrome Helper over and over and over in these
screenshots. And sure, none of them are the biggest single memory user, but...

In my experience, quitting Chrome lowers the memory usage of kernel_task
dramatically, so that Chrome is taking up even _more_ memory that you'd think
adding up all of the many Chrome-related processes.

I fully believe the OP, simply because they're not running Chrome. And I fully
believe each of the posters above me, too, and I'm pretty sure they're all
running Chrome.

I guess I'm suggesting that the difference is Chrome.

------
niahmiah
Try running a few docker containers to support development work. A few DBs,
messaging servers, Lucene indices, etc. Try prototyping applications using
map-reduce for huge datasets.

"Pro" doesn't always refer to the artistic line of professionals. Many
developers see this as a huge problem, and there are a lot of us.

Our options now include the 2005-era looking systems at system76.com, running
Linux. I love Linux for servers, but I really don't like the GUIs, or acting
as my own systems integrator. I want a true modern "Pro" macOS system, and
that doesn't exist right now.

~~~
viraptor
> Try running a few docker containers to support development work.

Docker containers should not take more memory than the same app running
without docker + a few megs for duplicated libraries. What matters is what's
running in the containers.

~~~
cesarb
Doesn't Docker on Mac run the containers inside a Virtualbox VM running Linux?
That should take quite a bit more memory than just running the app directly.

~~~
mhw
It used to, but the newer Docker for Mac uses xhyve which is more lightweight.
It also by default runs a pretty stripped down version of Linux. The default
VM size is 2Gb, but you can increase that if you need to.

I'm currently working on a project which involves a Docker replication of a
production environment. The Docker Compose environment has 7 docker containers
including Cassandra, Kafka and Flink plus some nodejs micro-services. This all
runs happily in a 6Gb docker container leaving memory free for Eclipse, Atom,
Outlook and a bunch of other applications on a 16Gb 2015 MacBook Pro. At no
point have I felt that the machine is performing poorly due to memory
exhaustion.

------
stevenhubertron
Let's just ignore very popular apps I don't like that happen to use a lot of
memory so I can make a point.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Maybe they shouldn't use tons of memory carelessly.

~~~
euyyn
But they do. And not necessarily carelessly.

~~~
mhw
There seems to be a pretty consistent pattern of Chrome and apps built with
Electron having large memory footprints. You should turn up here when an Atom
article hits the front page and see how HN commenters' attitudes to memory
consumption change then...

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FLGMwt
Not saying we have to, and the memory constraint might eventually make it
infeasible, but my team's developer process is a lot easier when we can run
our stack (12 web services, db, message bus, reporting service) at once.

There's definitely some optimization opportunities to address, but since the
only immediate bottleneck that's causing is in local dev, our resources are
better spent buying beefier dev rigs and focusing on delivering value.

------
mydpy
My machines are currently 16GB each (I have two MBPs). I imagine increasing
the amount of RAM I use in my next machine upgrade.

Anyone working on large scale data problems or doing advanced analytics
(Spark, R, Python, etc.) would appreciate having more memory to allocate to
their problems.

The analysis in this blog underestimates the complexity of various compute
environments.

------
prawn
Mine: 14.6GB used, 18GB swap used.

Twitter 2.99GB (old, ad-free client) Java 1.22GB Photoshop 1GB Transmit,
Spotify, Sublime, etc - 700MB each. Chrome core 2.8GB and then _79x_ (!)
Google Chrome Helper, each anything up to 2GB. Obviously not listing the loads
of things in the 200-700MB range.

Currently have Firefox, Safari and VirtualBox closed, though they are often
open for testing.

------
rinchik1
similar point here: [https://blog.rinatussenov.com/leave-apple-
alone-538d7619ce9e...](https://blog.rinatussenov.com/leave-apple-
alone-538d7619ce9e#.2pcdg1po1)

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antaviana
I tend to use AWS Windows or Linux machines for work and use the Mac basically
for Web browsing, RDP client and occasional Microsoft Office. This has removed
my need for a desktop or notebook with more 16MB, effectively lenghting the
useful life of my hardware. If I feel I need more RAM (up to 2TB), I just
shutdown the AWS instance, change the instance type and start it again.
Actually, with this setup, I very rarely have the urge to use my laptop, I
have a desktop in the 3 places I usually work from so I'm freed to drag a
laptop with me unless I travel.

~~~
tracker1
I used a chromebook for about a year, and would RDP to my home desktop when I
needed anything beefier... after that I went back to a new rMBP because I
needed macOS at the time. The 16gb is rarely an issue for me, but I could
easily see certain classes of workload that could make it so.

------
adamnemecek
None of the memory consumptions are realistic, I use most of the listed apps.
E.g. Xcode using 300 MB? Do you have one file open?

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ilurkedhere
Disk cache buffers. It's what's left after all your applications are resident,
and often impacts IO performance.

