7 ms·

Web Developer here. Wouldn't accept anything less than 32GB for a work machine.

by arvinsim 6y ago

jimbokun 6y ago
But have you benchmarked your workflow on x86+32GB vs M1+8GB?
- scoopertrooper 6y ago
  I'm typing this response on a 8GB M1. It's great, but its no magic. Its limitations do start to show in memory intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads. Getting some down votes, which I attribute to reasonable skepticism, so hopefully this will allay your concerns. https://ibb.co/VM4Z1DY https://ibb.co/VM4Z1DY
  - hiq 6y ago
    > memory intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads Such as?
    - scoopertrooper 6y ago
      One example, I was trying download all the dependencies for the Kafka project via Gradle with IntelliJ while watching a video on YouTube and working on another project in Visual Studio Code. The video started to stutter then stopped and Visual Studo Code became responsive. I basically had to shut a bunch of stuff down and go to lunch. I haven't seen a modern computer struggle with that kind of workload before.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  End of the day the Intel Macbooks of the last few years have been terrible low performance processors that get thermal constrained and have abysmal inconsistent battery life. So if all you use is Macs the M1 is going to feel amazing.
cj 6y ago
(Curious) why? VScode, Chrome, and a terminal running a local server usually will do fine with 16gb or less. Are you testing with or querying massive data sets locally or something?
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Chrome can fill all your ram, just add more tabs (I'm usually at 100-200+ unfortunately). With Firefox and auto tab suspend (addon), it's manageable.
GordonS 6y ago
Yep, if you're running big IDEs (e.g. Rider/IntelliJ, Visual Studio), containers and VMs, 32GB is really a must. There always seem to be people in these threads claiming that 16GB or even 8GB is enough - I just don't understand how that could possibly be for most of the HN demographic.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Yeah 32gb is my baseline now. I could probably work on a 16gb machine now but last time I was using an 8gb machine the memory was nearly constantly maxed out.
- hkstm 6y ago
  Do you think most of the HN demographic is actually running big IDEs, containers and VMs at the same time? I'm personally a CS student and never had to run more than a few lightweight docker containers + maybe one running some kind of database + VS Code and that has been working fine on a laptop with 8GB and pop_os. Could imagine that a lot of other people on HN are also just generally interested in tech but not necessarily running things that require a lot of memory locally.
  - kortex 6y ago
    I run like 50 chrome tabs, a half dozen Intellij panes, youtube, slack, and a bunch of heavy containers at the same time, and that's just my dev machine. My desktop is an ML container train/test machine. I also have ssh into two similar machines, and a 5 machine, 20GPU k8s cluster. I pretty much continuously have dozens of things building /running at once. Maybe I'm an outlier though?
  - twodave 6y ago
    Depending on the requirements of your job—-just a single VS instance with chrome, postman and slack open takes around 5GB. Teams adds another GB or so. The rest probably another 2GB (SSMS and the like). On my particular team we also run a dockerfile that includes elastic search, sql server, rabbitmq and consul—-I had to upgrade my work laptop from 16GB to 24GB to make it livable.
maigret 6y ago
Now I know why all the websites I use are so slow :D
- mehphp 6y ago
  haha so true
- tazjin 6y ago
  You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies gave their developers of client-facing software slower computers the resulting software would end up being faster.
  - shynrou 6y ago
    Yep because they would not get anything done ;) In my experience as a web dev, all the performance goes out the window as soon as the tracking scripts are added.
    - sevencolors 6y ago
      I had nearly a perfect Lighthouse score until the marketing team added GTM
  - lghh 6y ago
    But it would take them an order of magnitude longer to ship it. `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog.
    - tazjin 6y ago
      > `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog It may not be with fewer and less heavy dependencies!
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    It's not the end product itself that eats huge amounts of RAM or CPU. It's the dev tooling.
Toutouxc 6y ago
Another webdev here. My second dev machine has 8 GB RAM and works fine for my purposes. JetBrains IDE, MariaDB, Puma, browser.
- ascagnel_ 6y ago
  Throwing in some more anecdata: - 16GB MBP (Intel, not M1) - Running MacVim w/ coc.vim & coc-tsserver (so it's running partial TS compiles on save, much like VSCode) - One image running in Docker - Slack, Zoom (at idle), Safari (with a handful of tabs), and Mail.app running as well Per Activity Monitor, 8.97GB of 16.00GB is used with 4.97GB marked as "Cached Files" and another 2.04GB of swap used.
qaq 6y ago
Working on very enterprisy web app 100+ servics 30+ containers my MBP 16GB is handling it fine
ComodoHacker 6y ago
Anyone remembers the times when "web development" was something you could do on a pretty any computer available?

Web Developer here. Wouldn't accept anything less than 32GB for a work machine.

jimbokun 6y ago

But have you benchmarked your workflow on x86+32GB vs M1+8GB?

scoopertrooper 6y ago
I'm typing this response on a 8GB M1. It's great, but its no magic. Its limitations do start to show in memory intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads. Getting some down votes, which I attribute to reasonable skepticism, so hopefully this will allay your concerns. https://ibb.co/VM4Z1DY https://ibb.co/VM4Z1DY
- hiq 6y ago
  > memory intensive and heavily multi-threaded workloads Such as?
  - scoopertrooper 6y ago
    One example, I was trying download all the dependencies for the Kafka project via Gradle with IntelliJ while watching a video on YouTube and working on another project in Visual Studio Code. The video started to stutter then stopped and Visual Studo Code became responsive. I basically had to shut a bunch of stuff down and go to lunch. I haven't seen a modern computer struggle with that kind of workload before.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
End of the day the Intel Macbooks of the last few years have been terrible low performance processors that get thermal constrained and have abysmal inconsistent battery life. So if all you use is Macs the M1 is going to feel amazing.

cj 6y ago

(Curious) why? VScode, Chrome, and a terminal running a local server usually will do fine with 16gb or less. Are you testing with or querying massive data sets locally or something?

kzrdude 6y ago
Chrome can fill all your ram, just add more tabs (I'm usually at 100-200+ unfortunately). With Firefox and auto tab suspend (addon), it's manageable.

GordonS 6y ago

Yep, if you're running big IDEs (e.g. Rider/IntelliJ, Visual Studio), containers and VMs, 32GB is really a must. There always seem to be people in these threads claiming that 16GB or even 8GB is enough - I just don't understand how that could possibly be for most of the HN demographic.

the_only_law 6y ago
Yeah 32gb is my baseline now. I could probably work on a 16gb machine now but last time I was using an 8gb machine the memory was nearly constantly maxed out.
hkstm 6y ago
Do you think most of the HN demographic is actually running big IDEs, containers and VMs at the same time? I'm personally a CS student and never had to run more than a few lightweight docker containers + maybe one running some kind of database + VS Code and that has been working fine on a laptop with 8GB and pop_os. Could imagine that a lot of other people on HN are also just generally interested in tech but not necessarily running things that require a lot of memory locally.
- kortex 6y ago
  I run like 50 chrome tabs, a half dozen Intellij panes, youtube, slack, and a bunch of heavy containers at the same time, and that's just my dev machine. My desktop is an ML container train/test machine. I also have ssh into two similar machines, and a 5 machine, 20GPU k8s cluster. I pretty much continuously have dozens of things building /running at once. Maybe I'm an outlier though?
- twodave 6y ago
  Depending on the requirements of your job—-just a single VS instance with chrome, postman and slack open takes around 5GB. Teams adds another GB or so. The rest probably another 2GB (SSMS and the like). On my particular team we also run a dockerfile that includes elastic search, sql server, rabbitmq and consul—-I had to upgrade my work laptop from 16GB to 24GB to make it livable.

maigret 6y ago

Now I know why all the websites I use are so slow :D

mehphp 6y ago
haha so true
tazjin 6y ago
You joke, but I think this is actually true. If companies gave their developers of client-facing software slower computers the resulting software would end up being faster.
- shynrou 6y ago
  Yep because they would not get anything done ;) In my experience as a web dev, all the performance goes out the window as soon as the tracking scripts are added.
  - sevencolors 6y ago
    I had nearly a perfect Lighthouse score until the marketing team added GTM
- lghh 6y ago
  But it would take them an order of magnitude longer to ship it. `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog.
  - tazjin 6y ago
    > `npm install` even on a fast machine is a slog It may not be with fewer and less heavy dependencies!
- pdimitar 6y ago
  It's not the end product itself that eats huge amounts of RAM or CPU. It's the dev tooling.

Toutouxc 6y ago

Another webdev here. My second dev machine has 8 GB RAM and works fine for my purposes. JetBrains IDE, MariaDB, Puma, browser.

ascagnel_ 6y ago
Throwing in some more anecdata: - 16GB MBP (Intel, not M1) - Running MacVim w/ coc.vim & coc-tsserver (so it's running partial TS compiles on save, much like VSCode) - One image running in Docker - Slack, Zoom (at idle), Safari (with a handful of tabs), and Mail.app running as well Per Activity Monitor, 8.97GB of 16.00GB is used with 4.97GB marked as "Cached Files" and another 2.04GB of swap used.

qaq 6y ago

Working on very enterprisy web app 100+ servics 30+ containers my MBP 16GB is handling it fine

ComodoHacker 6y ago

Anyone remembers the times when "web development" was something you could do on a pretty any computer available?