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16GB is just barely ok for serious software development

Macative said:
LMAO. Apparently OP thinks RAM is supposed to sit there unused.

It doesn't matter if your Mac has 8 GB or 128 GB. The Mac will use every bit of available RAM on purpose because it is designed to. That's what it's there for. What's the point of having RAM if the system doesn't use it?

I love when people post this and think it means they barely have enough RAM, when it is literally the system working as its designed.
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nooooo ! . old age developer and newbie is diff . New bies , if not use ram waste ram. Old think about memory , leak so on ! .
 
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senttoschool said:
Oh for sure. I mainly use Go but Typescript is pretty much a standard in my industry.

We're not in the days of one single server doing everything anymore. We have to spawn multiple servers/microservices/VMs on local machines. Most people will encounter this kind of setup in modern day software development.
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thats mean you got big problem and mess . For us , if needed we download the branch . No need remove . If you want to debug this age language yes kinda bad e.g

front end react - one server
back end whatever node js server - one server
android studio
xcode
some other apps

totally sum if nooot close - for sure 20 gb ram easily. And if playing those docker thing one vm 2 to 4 gb and some as e.g 5 docker . You end up 28 gb.

Solution , find staff not blame the hardware .
 
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JMacHack said:
If I may be pedantic:

Software development is more than just Javascript. You could get away with 16 gigs on different languages for different purposes!

Embedded device programming comes to mind readily. A buddy of mine does that work on an old thinkpad running ubuntu.
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Yep. I'm a iOS/macOS developer and use Xcode primarily and work on some very large enterprise apps and I work off of a 16gb ram MacBook from 2017 just fine with a lot of other stuff running in the background.

EDIT: To be clear our next round of dev machines, if we ever get them will have more ram, but right now it's workable.
 
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senttoschool said:
Oh for sure. I mainly use Go but Typescript is pretty much a standard in my industry.

We're not in the days of one single server doing everything anymore. We have to spawn multiple servers/microservices/VMs on local machines. Most people will encounter this kind of setup in modern day software development.
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I don’t doubt your use case, I just felt like playing devils advocate.
 
I'm working with Xcode, a few simulators, Sketch, Safari, TablePlus, with only 8GB of RAM and it does the job but it's limited at times.
But I'll wait for M2 Pro/M2 Max and will upgrade to 16GB or 32GB.

I had 32GB from 2013 to 2021 and it's always been too much.
 
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Zorori said:
Pretty sure you can manually configure Nord and avoid the UI. So there's a free 500MB for you.

You should try Scala or Java/Kotlin development + Docker. I usually have to reserve 4GB of RAM of IntelliJ alone and any servers are likely to take more memory than Node processes. I presume Xcode is also rather hungry, but I hate it so never bothered.

16GB was the sweetspot for development about 5 years back. So these days 24GB would be nice, but I have my hackintosh for anything that's memory hungry or needs VMs.

If you really need to run those services, use something like surge.sh or some other simple service you can push to. Likewise you could stop running Dropbox, Discord, and WhatsApp -- they aren't necessary for development. Instead, open them when you need them.
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I’ll second Docker, and I’d suggest that you could probably spin up an AWS instance to host at least some of those Node servers fairly economically. I couldn’t really say anything about development performance myself, as most of my development isn’t local these days, and my local PC is just for connecting to an HVD. I could even do my work on an iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard. (Of course, I’m also currently in enterprise development, so my experience is probably foreign to most developers.)
 
senttoschool said:
View attachment 2021757

Anyone serious about software development should most definitely upgrade to 32GB of RAM.

For me, I run the following when I write and test code:
  • 2x Typescript watch Node.js services
  • 1-2x React Node.js servers
  • Go server
  • VS Code
  • Chrome tabs + Chrome dev tools
  • Communication channels including Slack, Whatsapp, Discord
  • TablePlus database tool
  • Notion for note-taking
My M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM struggles sometimes with stutters - especially when Typescript does its thing. I noticed that I'm almost always beyond 16GB of RAM usage and swaps are always used.

If you do software development for a living, and you plan to keep the machine for a while, go for 32GB of RAM at minimum.

I planned to wait until M3 before I upgrade but I'm considering upgrading if/when M2 Pro hits and getting a 32GB machine instead.
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I’m curious about what you’re using the second Node server and the second Typescript watch service for. Other than that, it seems like a pretty bog standard full-stack React environment, very reminiscent of my React days. (Though I was using Java and Spring instead of Go, and I tended to have a Java IDE open [Eclipse with the Spring extensions], as well as VS Code.)
 
zakarhino said:
Just because the system is 'working as intended' doesn't mean the system is working fast. OP's workflow might 'work' on 8GB but it won't be fast enough for someone that cares about reducing as much system stuttering as possible when working.

The memory pressure graph is a hint. OP is clearly not the guy with one tab open on a 32GB machine complaining about not enough memory.
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WIth the way swap works on M1 machines and fast storage, you'll never notice it. OP is doing something else wrong if he's not just trolling.
 
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jav6454 said:
That matters not if the system is slowing down due to too much Swap. At that point your memory pressure is the clear indicator you need more memory. Sticking to 8GB because it's designed to is just plain wrong.
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Literally all tests that have been done show no measurable slow down due to swap, on M1 machines. OP has something else going on.
 
Macative said:
LMAO. Apparently OP thinks RAM is supposed to sit there unused.

It doesn't matter if your Mac has 8 GB or 128 GB. The Mac will use every bit of available RAM on purpose because it is designed to. That's what it's there for. What's the point of having RAM if the system doesn't use it?

I love when people post this and think it means they barely have enough RAM, when it is literally the system working as its designed.
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Then, how come my Mac mini doesn't use more than half of its RAM? (The language is Swedish, but it should be intelligible nonetheless). Still LYAO?

dump.png
 
Well it's a good thing I'm not a professional. I only bought a 14 inch Macbook Pro for the screen and speakers so it made sense to get base spec. If I needed the capabilities for software development I would've bought a Mac Studio.
 
JMacHack said:
If I may be pedantic:

Software development is more than just Javascript. You could get away with 16 gigs on different languages for different purposes!

Embedded device programming comes to mind readily. A buddy of mine does that work on an old thinkpad running ubuntu.
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You heard OP, this isn’t “serious” software development.
 
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jav6454 said:
YMMV, everyone's needs are different.
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This is true. I use my M1 100% of the time and find it to be the best platform I've every used/owned. I am so happy with it and how well it performed I'll be good with it for quite a while. I want a MacPro real bad but it's power-lust more than anything and I'll likely spurge later down the road.

My usage is offset by docker, cloud, and VMs, I push this machine and it's comfortable.
 
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Macative said:
Literally all tests that have been done show no measurable slow down due to swap, on M1 machines. OP has something else going on.
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That was actually one of the first things I tested when I got an M1 Mac. Once memory ran out, some memory-heavy workloads became 30x slower, 100x slower, and even 300x slower.

SSDs are quite fast as long as you are measuring bandwidth. If you care more about latency or IOPS, they are still something like 1000x slower than RAM. If your software is actually using the memory it reserves instead of just caching data for later use, the difference between swapping and not swapping is enormous.
 
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JouniS said:
That was actually one of the first things I tested when I got an M1 Mac. Once memory ran out, some memory-heavy workloads became 30x slower, 100x slower, and even 300x slower.

SSDs are quite fast as long as you are measuring bandwidth. If you care more about latency or IOPS, they are still something like 1000x slower than RAM. If your software is actually using the memory it reserves instead of just caching data for later use, the difference between swapping and not swapping is enormous.
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Agreed. People just tend to see SSD Swap and think it'll be "fast enough" until they realize it doesn't work that way.
 
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Use vim - plenty of RAM left then.

Incidentally I was writing fairly large Go programs on an 8Gb M1 Air with no problems at all with VSCode. Rarely hit the memory pressure issues on that.

NordVPN though. Seriously? Nearly half a gig?!?!

Also run slack in a browser rather than the electron crap.
 
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