3 ms·

I find that crazy. I bought a computer with 16gb of ram in 2011 and by 2015 I was hitting OOM left and right. I bought a mac mini with 32 GB in 2018 and I mana

I find that crazy. I bought a computer with 16gb of ram in 2011 and by 2015 I was hitting OOM left and right. I bought a mac mini with 32 GB in 2018 and I managed to OOM it a few times and oh boy was it ugly - already regret not taking the 64gb option at the time.

rblatz 6y ago
Agreed I’ve been 16gb+ for a decade now. He seems to have under-specced on ram and HD.
qz2 6y ago
I risked it on an 8gb mini and quite frankly i can’t bend it even if I try. Only thing it’ll probably die on is running VMs which I’m not going to do any more. They can live in DigitalOcean. One liner review: this is the only computer I’ve ever had which can keep up with me.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
> a mac mini with 32 GB in 2018 and I managed to OOM it a few times and oh boy was it ugly How?
turtlebits 6y ago
Depends on what you're doing. People have been saying this for years and my personal 2011 17", 2016 13" and 2018 Mini have never had more than 8GB. Never noticed an issue. Unless you know you're going to be running memory intensive workloads, I see no need.
threeseed 6y ago
SSD performance has improved such that if you do need to swap it's not a huge impact to performance. It was a very different situation even only a few years ago.
- agildehaus 6y ago
  Swapping would not be good for the longevity of the SSD.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    Most of the 8GB users aren't likely to fully use all of the SSD. So with wear levelling you should see the SSD last well beyond the usable lifespan of the device.
goalieca 6y ago
My wife has a 2013 mba with 4gb of ram. She’s never hit the limit doing office365, Firefox, and Citrix. I have a 16gb dev machine at work and I’ve only OOM a few times. I can’t actually tell you how little ram my phone has but it’s certainly less than 4.
LockAndLol 6y ago
How did you manage hitting OOM on 16GB, let alone 32? I'm curious. I had 8 till 2018 and then 16. Not even once did I run out of memory and I was running java apps in docker.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  Very often with compilation & LTO of large software in C++, having 2/3 VMs open (not just docker, the whole GUI stack as it's for debugging a GUI software)
ghshephard 6y ago
I upgraded to my M1 Macbook Air from a 2015 Macbook Air with 8GB of memory, i5 even. I almost never run into memory issues with it - ran the full complement of browser tabs, Microsoft Office, pixelmator, Photos, VPN Client, bit of Jupyter-labs, etc... I do most of my data engineering in the cloud, or on a 32 GB Linux system - so I don't need a lot of memory for data sets - just something that will run the applications. I would never recommend that the average user buy more than 8GB of memory with a Mac Laptop. Meanwhile - my 16 GB Linux Laptop (Ubuntu 20.04 Dell XPS 15 7590) routinely comes to a crashing halt if I try and do something crazy like open up 40 Browser Tabs and then start zoom. It's horrible. I've spent hours trying to see what's going on with top to no avail. If only it was a graceful degradation - but open a single browser tab on the wrong site once you are close to the edge- game over. Usually faster to just restart the system than wait for whatever swapping is happening to conclude. I've rarely had this happen to me on the MacBook Air. Different operating systems/hardware really seem to make a difference using pretty much the same workload, speaking from personal experience of someone who splits their time 50/50 on Linux and macOS.
- aprdm 6y ago
  You can tune how the linux memory allocation works, I've done some changes in a couple of servers (couldn't find which settings in the 60 seconds I google), might be worth investigating in workstations too. (Not saying it is ergonomic or better than the mac.)
- vbarrielle 6y ago
  Which browser are you using? I've got no issue with around 50 tabs in Firefox in a similar laptop. But maybe I don't visit the same memory heavy websites. It's usually gcc that eats up all my memory, turns out with template metaprogramming a single gcc instance can eat 3GB of RAM, and I usually build with 6 parallel instances. Thankfully I've got plentiful SSD-backed swap so I don't feel the system becoming too unresponsive.
- scns 6y ago
  Maybe zram can help you on Ubuntu: https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config It decreases swapping to disk by using a compressed ramdisk for logs, unused stuff etc. The zram-config from universe may be broken (https://github.com/StuartIanNaylor/zram-swap-config https://github.com/StuartIanNaylor/zram-swap-config)

rblatz 6y ago

Agreed I’ve been 16gb+ for a decade now. He seems to have under-specced on ram and HD.

qz2 6y ago

I risked it on an 8gb mini and quite frankly i can’t bend it even if I try. Only thing it’ll probably die on is running VMs which I’m not going to do any more. They can live in DigitalOcean. One liner review: this is the only computer I’ve ever had which can keep up with me.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

> a mac mini with 32 GB in 2018 and I managed to OOM it a few times and oh boy was it ugly How?

turtlebits 6y ago

Depends on what you're doing. People have been saying this for years and my personal 2011 17", 2016 13" and 2018 Mini have never had more than 8GB. Never noticed an issue. Unless you know you're going to be running memory intensive workloads, I see no need.

threeseed 6y ago

SSD performance has improved such that if you do need to swap it's not a huge impact to performance. It was a very different situation even only a few years ago.

agildehaus 6y ago
Swapping would not be good for the longevity of the SSD.
- threeseed 6y ago
  Most of the 8GB users aren't likely to fully use all of the SSD. So with wear levelling you should see the SSD last well beyond the usable lifespan of the device.

goalieca 6y ago

My wife has a 2013 mba with 4gb of ram. She’s never hit the limit doing office365, Firefox, and Citrix. I have a 16gb dev machine at work and I’ve only OOM a few times. I can’t actually tell you how little ram my phone has but it’s certainly less than 4.

LockAndLol 6y ago

How did you manage hitting OOM on 16GB, let alone 32? I'm curious. I had 8 till 2018 and then 16. Not even once did I run out of memory and I was running java apps in docker.

jcelerier 6y ago
Very often with compilation & LTO of large software in C++, having 2/3 VMs open (not just docker, the whole GUI stack as it's for debugging a GUI software)

ghshephard 6y ago

I upgraded to my M1 Macbook Air from a 2015 Macbook Air with 8GB of memory, i5 even. I almost never run into memory issues with it - ran the full complement of browser tabs, Microsoft Office, pixelmator, Photos, VPN Client, bit of Jupyter-labs, etc... I do most of my data engineering in the cloud, or on a 32 GB Linux system - so I don't need a lot of memory for data sets - just something that will run the applications. I would never recommend that the average user buy more than 8GB of memory with a Mac Laptop. Meanwhile - my 16 GB Linux Laptop (Ubuntu 20.04 Dell XPS 15 7590) routinely comes to a crashing halt if I try and do something crazy like open up 40 Browser Tabs and then start zoom. It's horrible. I've spent hours trying to see what's going on with top to no avail. If only it was a graceful degradation - but open a single browser tab on the wrong site once you are close to the edge- game over. Usually faster to just restart the system than wait for whatever swapping is happening to conclude. I've rarely had this happen to me on the MacBook Air. Different operating systems/hardware really seem to make a difference using pretty much the same workload, speaking from personal experience of someone who splits their time 50/50 on Linux and macOS.

aprdm 6y ago
You can tune how the linux memory allocation works, I've done some changes in a couple of servers (couldn't find which settings in the 60 seconds I google), might be worth investigating in workstations too. (Not saying it is ergonomic or better than the mac.)
vbarrielle 6y ago
Which browser are you using? I've got no issue with around 50 tabs in Firefox in a similar laptop. But maybe I don't visit the same memory heavy websites. It's usually gcc that eats up all my memory, turns out with template metaprogramming a single gcc instance can eat 3GB of RAM, and I usually build with 6 parallel instances. Thankfully I've got plentiful SSD-backed swap so I don't feel the system becoming too unresponsive.
scns 6y ago
Maybe zram can help you on Ubuntu: https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config It decreases swapping to disk by using a compressed ramdisk for logs, unused stuff etc. The zram-config from universe may be broken (https://github.com/StuartIanNaylor/zram-swap-config https://github.com/StuartIanNaylor/zram-swap-config)