4 ms·

Why can't modern developer applications use less resources? (Partially rhetorical, partially genuinely curious about what's the problem here.)

francislavoie 4y ago
Jetbrains IDEs index your entire codebase for intellisense to make instantaneous suggestions as you type, etc. Those indexes across many vectors take up a lot of space. I don't see how it could take less, for a project of this size. It's actively useful for me to have it loaded in memory. Occasionally I run tools that provision an in-memory graph db to run some analysis, and that sometimes takes up to 16GB alone. Can't really reduce that either, it's just raw data. I don't see the RAM usage of these apps as a problem. IMO the problem is that Dell is not respectful of that need for RAM and they don't make it available to buy the specs I need.
- oakpond 4y ago
  I'm not saying that it's not weird you can't get 32GB. I agree that's a problem. I just don't understand why these things have to take up so much memory. Why does it need to be all in-memory? How slow would it really be if you put some of that on disk? At the risk of sounding like a very grumpy old man: I still remember being able to build code with VC++6 and less than 1G of RAM, with a full desktop running. Nowadays it's like I cannot even compile a project with less than 8G of RAM in a terminal without risking a kernel freeze. What happened? Meh.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Containers craziness happened.
- alyandon 4y ago
  Sounds like there is something wrong with your local installation. I work on a multi MILLION line code base with IntelliJ and it stays comfortably under 2 GB at all times. Maybe an errant plugin?
  - francislavoie 4y ago
    I have multiple projects open (5-ish), each are quite big. The biggest one is PHP with tons of vendor dependencies and also a pretty big Typescript app within it with a big node_modules.
    - alyandon 4y ago
      node_modules :( You have my sympathy.

francislavoie 4y ago

Jetbrains IDEs index your entire codebase for intellisense to make instantaneous suggestions as you type, etc. Those indexes across many vectors take up a lot of space. I don't see how it could take less, for a project of this size. It's actively useful for me to have it loaded in memory. Occasionally I run tools that provision an in-memory graph db to run some analysis, and that sometimes takes up to 16GB alone. Can't really reduce that either, it's just raw data. I don't see the RAM usage of these apps as a problem. IMO the problem is that Dell is not respectful of that need for RAM and they don't make it available to buy the specs I need.

oakpond 4y ago
I'm not saying that it's not weird you can't get 32GB. I agree that's a problem. I just don't understand why these things have to take up so much memory. Why does it need to be all in-memory? How slow would it really be if you put some of that on disk? At the risk of sounding like a very grumpy old man: I still remember being able to build code with VC++6 and less than 1G of RAM, with a full desktop running. Nowadays it's like I cannot even compile a project with less than 8G of RAM in a terminal without risking a kernel freeze. What happened? Meh.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Containers craziness happened.
alyandon 4y ago
Sounds like there is something wrong with your local installation. I work on a multi MILLION line code base with IntelliJ and it stays comfortably under 2 GB at all times. Maybe an errant plugin?
- francislavoie 4y ago
  I have multiple projects open (5-ish), each are quite big. The biggest one is PHP with tons of vendor dependencies and also a pretty big Typescript app within it with a big node_modules.
  - alyandon 4y ago
    node_modules :( You have my sympathy.