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Counter-example: I worked in ML research at one of the largest companies in the field (in the billions of predictions per day) and 16GB was more than enough to

by wooter 9y ago

Counter-example: I worked in ML research at one of the largest companies in the field (in the billions of predictions per day) and 16GB was more than enough to do anything I would ever do on a laptop/tablet/etc.. Furthermore, I found that solutions which couldn't be successfully worked on with <16GB RAM were basically architecturally unsound. Not being able to scale the workload on demand or control peak demand. Extra RAM just hid poor developers from their non-scalable solutions - or just increased their downtime till they got an OUT OF MEM error. The issues were only exacerbated at scale - failing even with 128+ GB in RAM. Basically, when the difference between a dev sample and a prod sample is 3+ orders of magnitude, your ability to scale the process up/down, fail gracefully, even battery life, etc. are far more important than having large swathes of memory to fail on. Especially on the go. If you do deal with production (big) data, you're ssh'ed in to some always-on, process-maintained hardware if only for the sake of latency and interruptions. And you better have the toolset to do it. How much memory does a terminal take? For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.

mmahemoff 9y ago
I'm not crunching big data in development or doing much with graphics (other than occasional faffing on some image editor). What I'm running is a lot of local servers. Each server has overhead even if you are only storing one byte of data. ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards) And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250 browser tabs, Slack, Hangouts, etc. I'm sure there are all manner of optimisations and assumptions that could cut things down, but I'd rather the big manufacturers upgrade their RAM capacity every few years so I can focus on a dev environment that's a good approximation for prod.
- wooter 9y ago
  Dev-Prod parity is probably the best reason to want the extra power, but then you're just limiting your software to the lowest common denominator between mobile computing and a server farm. At the end of the day, if you want to take advantage of the big guns, you will have to sacrifice mobility or parity and spend some good time on devOps. And even an extra 16GB won't get you around that. Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.
  - StillBored 9y ago
    I frequently have that many tabs open because I use them as lighter one-shot bookmarks (although see onetab). Basically things that I need/want to refer back to once or twice but don't want to bookmark. So they tend to stack up until I go through them and close out the stuff I'm no longer interested in. Really I think FF/etc should probably just garbage collect most of them if they haven't been active for a few days.
MichaelGG 9y ago
I'm using 13GB right now just doing some normal web/backend dev. 4GB to a Linux VM running VScode and some servers. Then add Outlook/VS/Firefox/Chrome and a bunch of other utilities and I'm there. I've only got about 40 open tabs total (few docs, few Azure, few GCP, several reading), across all browsers so I'm not going nuts on that side.
- wooter 9y ago
  Yea... I never said you couldn't saturate the memory, just that if it saturates 16 GB easily, its a shitty architecture. you're running a 4GB VM to run an IDE inside it... and "40 tabs"? That could be anything between a couple MB and X GB depending on the content. Not really a measure of anything. Just think about how much more efficient Chrome/Google is being than you're 4GB+ VSCode (text editor) set up.
Arelius 9y ago
> For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really. I do work in graphics/rendering, I work on laptops often and plan to get a surface pro, 16 GBs is the most painful part of working on a laptop for sure. It is the primary reason I spend most of my day on the 128GB ram desktop whenever I'm close. But even 32GB would go a long way for me.

by wooter 9y ago

mmahemoff 9y ago

I'm not crunching big data in development or doing much with graphics (other than occasional faffing on some image editor). What I'm running is a lot of local servers. Each server has overhead even if you are only storing one byte of data. ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards) And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250 browser tabs, Slack, Hangouts, etc. I'm sure there are all manner of optimisations and assumptions that could cut things down, but I'd rather the big manufacturers upgrade their RAM capacity every few years so I can focus on a dev environment that's a good approximation for prod.

wooter 9y ago
Dev-Prod parity is probably the best reason to want the extra power, but then you're just limiting your software to the lowest common denominator between mobile computing and a server farm. At the end of the day, if you want to take advantage of the big guns, you will have to sacrifice mobility or parity and spend some good time on devOps. And even an extra 16GB won't get you around that. Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.
- StillBored 9y ago
  I frequently have that many tabs open because I use them as lighter one-shot bookmarks (although see onetab). Basically things that I need/want to refer back to once or twice but don't want to bookmark. So they tend to stack up until I go through them and close out the stuff I'm no longer interested in. Really I think FF/etc should probably just garbage collect most of them if they haven't been active for a few days.

MichaelGG 9y ago

I'm using 13GB right now just doing some normal web/backend dev. 4GB to a Linux VM running VScode and some servers. Then add Outlook/VS/Firefox/Chrome and a bunch of other utilities and I'm there. I've only got about 40 open tabs total (few docs, few Azure, few GCP, several reading), across all browsers so I'm not going nuts on that side.

wooter 9y ago
Yea... I never said you couldn't saturate the memory, just that if it saturates 16 GB easily, its a shitty architecture. you're running a 4GB VM to run an IDE inside it... and "40 tabs"? That could be anything between a couple MB and X GB depending on the content. Not really a measure of anything. Just think about how much more efficient Chrome/Google is being than you're 4GB+ VSCode (text editor) set up.

Arelius 9y ago

> For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really. I do work in graphics/rendering, I work on laptops often and plan to get a surface pro, 16 GBs is the most painful part of working on a laptop for sure. It is the primary reason I spend most of my day on the 128GB ram desktop whenever I'm close. But even 32GB would go a long way for me.