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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

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)

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)