Nine Reasons Why 8GB Is Only Just Enough

http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/post/2009/02/13/Nine-Reasons-Why-8GB-Is-Only-Just-Enough-(For-A-Professional-Business-Software-Developer).aspx

by Anon84 • 17 years ago

12 60 17 years ago

jondavis.net

tdavis5• 17 years ago

Quite a few of my start-up friends use laptops exclusively and I've never understood how they can be very productive on them. Besides the resource issue, they're only working with a single screen, usually a 15" one at that! I have a Macbook that I will occasionally use for work (though mostly just for reading HN after I wake up, as I am now), but a mere 17" of screen real state and 2GB of RAM is just not enough for the long-term.

Compare this to the 48" of screen and 6GB of RAM I get from my Mac Pro and there is no comparison. Still, even on that machine I routinely use 4 Spaces because there's just too much crap to keep on one desktop. Another advantage is never having to think about what to keep open; everything I use on a daily basis is always open and accessible in a Space without any waiting. There's no way I could do this on my laptop.

I think mobile working is a possibility, but I simply don't believe that laptops can replace desktops when it comes to software development.

unalone2• 17 years ago

Some of us can't afford Mac Pros. For me, Macbook Pro is about the limit of what I can afford.

tdavis5• 17 years ago

The 17" MBP is very nearly the same price as a Mac Pro, and nothing says you need to buy one of those. You could build an impressive Linux desktop for far less than either of those machines.

carterschonwald• 17 years ago

the current generation of macbook/macbook pro's unofficially can handle up to 6 gb's of memory and i think that a pretty nice desktop setup is just to use your laptop but have 1-2 additional screens and a nice keyboard and mouse pair.

Though honestly, as far as I can tell, the main utility of having multiple screens is to physically separate your work from you fun visually and hence make it easier to focus.

Anon84• 17 years ago

I have a 15" MBP with 4GB of RAM. Whenever I'm in the office I connect it to a 22" LCD, time machine backup, external mouse, keyboard and storage, etc...

I think of it more as a moveable desktop than a laptop but I like being able to carry all of my files, settings and apps around with me when I travel (and still have everything properly backed up). Give me a decent network connection anywhere in the world and I'm almost as productive as if I was sitting in my office.

gravitycop4• 17 years ago

a mere 17" of screen real state and 2GB of RAM is just not enough for the long-term.

Compare this to the 48" of screen and 6GB of RAM I get from my Mac Pro

You run four 24" monitors?

tdavis5• 17 years ago

No, two. I just meant as a total area. Unless 24 + 24 != 48... you've confused me.

tsuraan5• 17 years ago

Screen real estate isn't reasonably measured in inches; resolution makes a ton more sense. My laptop's display is 1600x900, which is plenty of room for three terminals side-by-side. The screen itself is only 13.3" though. On the other hand, I know plenty of people with 20" displays that run them at really low resolutions, such as 1024x768 or 1280x1024.

Why couldn't you use Spaces on a laptop? My old powerbook G4 ran spaces just fine; I used 6 of them; one for email, one for a browser, and the rest for terminals. I never had a problem with it.

gravitycop4• 17 years ago

1600x900 [...] only 13.3"

That works out to a horizontal PPI of 138.03. http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html If subpixel rendering is being used (e.g. ClearType on Windows), then the horizontal PPI [EDIT: when displaying text] is 3x that, or 414.09. Don't you think some of those subpixels might be wasted on such a small screen? What is your typical viewing distance?

dcurtis• 17 years ago

I use my MacBook Pro for design in Photoshop and development in TextMate + terminals + webkit. It's nice to be plugged into a screen, of course, but I can operate just fine with six spaces at 1440x900. I've become quite efficient with it, actually.

The cost and size and power consumption of a desktop just doesn't make sense anymore unless you're doing serious data processing, video editing, or something like that. I like to work at coffee shops and outside often, too, and you definitely cannot do that with a desktop.

Now that I think about it, you actually are the only developer I know who works on a desktop.

briansmith• 17 years ago

I think the original author is overestimating the cost of swapping. If you have a decent amount of memory (2GB+) and a fast hard drive (7200RPM+) you will usually get decent performance even when you have lots of memory-intensive tasks open.

Personally, I run Vista + 3-4 virtual machines + Outlook + Carbide.c++ and/or IntelliJ IDEA and/or NetBeans + a bunch of web browsers + multiple databases with 3GB of RAM with no problem.

I use a 14.1" screen on my laptop. Sometimes I wish I was using a bigger screen, but the majority of the time screen real estate isn't a big problem. In order to really make use of a giant screen I would need some new plugins for my IDEs that let me control my web browsers while keeping the focus in the editor. Otherwise, the smaller screen actually makes it easier for me to focus on the what I am looking at--everything is always in the center of the screen.

The main issue I have with my current system is with the CPU speed. Since I started doing C++ programming I have really noticed the slowness of my 3-year-old CPU and memory. I would love for my builds to complete instantly instead of taking 3-5 seconds each.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

I have a 24" monitor at home, and it's nice, but I don't have any trouble working from my 9" netbook screen either. I use Xmonad, so I can basically manage windows in my mind instead of by moving them around on screen. I only need to see what I am interacting with -- if I need something else, it is just a keystroke away.

A bigger monitor just means I can be easily distracted by IRC, since I can see my code and IRC window at the same time. That is not necessarily good for productivity :)

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

This is the second comment by you on xmonad I've seen in a few minutes - have you written anywhere about your use of it, or do you know of anyone else who has written a good summary/explanation/use case of it?

krschultz• 17 years ago

There are 8 enginers at my startup. Four use Lenovo laptops (1 with the write on screen), 2 use Mac Book Pro's, and 2 use desktops. In terms of power, we're all on Linux or Mac OSX and we have enough power for most stuff, if we need more there is a 16 core build server we share. In terms of interface, we all have 2 monitors and nice keyboards and just put the laptop on a stand during the day. The productivity of being able to just grab your laptop and take it home for late night hacking, or on an airplane to a conference, or in a meeting you just don't want to pay attention to outweighs giving up 20% more power.

dasil003• 17 years ago

So true. I can take my laptop home. I can take it to the coffee shop. Tomorrow I'm taking a bus up to Tahoe to do snowboarding. 4 hour bus ride will allow me to get plenty of work done on the way (thank you git!).

30" display + Aeron is definitely well worth it for office productivity, but frankly 4GB+2Ghz+2cores is plenty of juice for my typical web dev load which includes Photoshop/Illustrator/2 Parallels Instances.

When people make these arguments about 2x performance increasing dev performance by a similar factor I call bullshit. Frankly I spend less than 5-10% of my time waiting for the machine, and even when I do that I'm still thinking, which is what developers should be spending most of their time doing anyway.

Better approach to developer productivity is incremental process improvement. Analyze problems. Automate checks to prevent them in the future. Spend time refactoring. Maintain a test suite. Set up continuous integration. Over time these things make the difference of an order of magnitude for programmer productivity.

mixmax2• 17 years ago

I can't help to notice that all the apps he's talking about that add to the overall memory load are Microsoft apps.

I'm using an open source editor, gmail, xamp, and some webbased servuces and I'm having no problems with 1GB of memory.

xenophanes4• 17 years ago

I'm on OS X. 1GB would not work. I have 3 GB. Activity monitor is showing these top 5 rsize values:

Safari 550 MB. Safari leaks memory, and restarting it then reopening all tabs is quite slow.

kernal_task 322 MB

Textmate 300MB (not normal)

WindowServer 136 MB

Mail 106 MB

tsuraan5• 17 years ago

I think you must be looking at the total memory for the apps (including shared libraries, etc), because I ran OSX with 512MB for five years without much trouble. I typically had mail, opera, and tons of terminals open, and there was still typically around 40MB of free memory. Upgrading my laptop to 2GB did allow me to run safari and webkit and iTunes (now that's a hog) at the same time, which was definitely nicer, but I never really felt crippled by only having 512MB before that.

likpok2• 17 years ago

Indeed. On my system (2GB), I use Vim in urxvt with zsh.

From top: .1 + .4 + .2= .7% of my ram. I could add in Postgres or sqlite and Apache (or even a lighter weight webserver) if I really needed it, and still probably not use my swap.

Jebdm2• 17 years ago

I noticed that as well. I run Ubuntu, which could be part of it (although that's not to say Ubuntu's not a little bloated as well). Just to test this, I opened up every program that I could think of which I use on a regular basis:

  - Firefox, with 20 tabs
  - Skype
  - Pidgin
  - Three terminal windows, running Python, vim, and CherryPy
  - Songbird
  - GIMP with a photo loaded
  - Two OpenOffice Writer files
  - Geany (a text editor) with nine tabs
  - Nautilus
  - Three large PDFs (books) using Evince Document Viewer
  - System Monitor (not much)

And I'm only at 1.2 GB! (No swap, out of 2 GB total.) I rarely have all of these programs open at once, either.

While I agree with his point in general, it might be overall more effective to avoid relying on apps as bloated as Visual Studio. Then, you can save some of the money on computer upgrades and avoid any negatives that might be associated with developing on a high-end computer. (Of course, I'm a moron for suggesting that there might be any.)

mkuhn• 17 years ago

I agree with you that using less bloated software could be an option but for some it just isn't an option and they are bound to use (at least some of) the bloated software because of the platform they are developing for or other dependencies...

I think what we can take from the article is that companies bound to use such software have to invest a bit more for their hardware, and to be honest, the costs for the additional RAM probably are pretty negligible compared to the licensing costs for the "bloated software".

Of course 8 GB is a pretty high number but it doesn't come with that high a price anymore.

Hexstream• 17 years ago

Nine Reasons Why 8GB Is Only Just Enough... For A Smug, Self-Righteous Windows Developer.

nihilocrat• 17 years ago

I stopped reading when I read this:

Every business software developer should have his own copy of SQL Server Developer Edition.

edit: Oh god, I didn't notice this nugget:

Note to the morons who argue "this is why developers are writing big, bloated software that suck up resources" .. Dear moron, this post is from the perspective of an actual developer’s workstation, not a mere bit-twiddling programmer

I wonder how this guy manages to hold down a job with such a hostile attitude.

Hell, I can't make this crap up. Here's from another post:

People who swear by Linux for the most part only hate Windows for the sake of hating Microsoft; it has little to nothing to do with the overall quality of the Windows product. They just feel that they have the moral prerogative to spread hate of Microsoft throughout the world.

mixmax2• 17 years ago

There's a little bit of truth to that last statement though ;-)

soult• 17 years ago

Actually I "hate" Windows because after 15 years and 6 major version it is still crap. There are so many errors, bugs, crashes in Vista that you wonder if the developers of Windows are all retarded.

earl• 17 years ago

Yeah, the blog author manages to bring the stupid. Perhaps he should go take a look at alexa, and note how every site not owned by Microsoft uses so-called cult operating systems?

mtarnovan• 17 years ago

A smug, self-righteous windows developer he is indeed. Check out this other post of his: http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/post/2009/02/01/15-Reasons-...

cookiecaper• 17 years ago

It's hard to take that seriously. Guy is a non-sensical MS fanboy, much like the 13-year-olds who believe that their allegiance to Microsoft makes them wise just because MS has more desktop marketshare than competitors. Article is ridiculous, dude is an anachronism. He should be returned to junior high so that he can have a second shot to mature out of this phase. My feelings do flash about.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

I've never seen someone document software bloat so effectively.

ComputerGuru• 17 years ago

8GB is almost barely just enough, but that article is fluff.

No one has all those apps running at once, and the numbers are exaggerated.

The real reason 8GB is just enough: open task manager and look at the virtual memory size for your applications. All that can be a lot faster if you have the memory to stick it in.

hedgehog• 17 years ago

That number doesn't correspond to how much physical memory an app will use. Just see how much RAM is free or being used for disk cache during your normal workload, if that number is less than 500MB you would probably benefit from more memory.

daleharvey2• 17 years ago

people developing end user products should be given a machine that matches the average machine the application will be used on. fast and powerful machines reserved for fast feedback of large testing.

developing an interface on an 8GB machine then hoping it will run nice and fast on X users 1GB laptop is just silly.

that aside, I develop entirely on my laptop, I run linux, virtualbox with windows xp, photoshop + excel, emacs, firefox and a shell and it never breaks a sweat

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

no, they should be given the worst possible machines their application is still expected to run on, then it will run like greased lightning and use very little resources for everybody else.

The main reason I see for code bloat is because developers have too powerful machines.

daleharvey2• 17 years ago

yeh I was going to say lowest common denominator, but if they are running reasonably expensive dev tools then that kinda evens out

thwarted• 17 years ago

I worked for a guy who wouldn't buy even modern machines for developers using the logic "if they write code that runs really fast on a 486, think how fast it'll run on a pentium" (yes, this was that long ago). This completely ignored that we couldn't use SIMD instructions/MMX or chip specific optimizations which exist because they are significant faster and more efficient than the alternatives.

Even if you use the latest and greatest machine for development, by the time you release the machine is out-dated in some respect.

magoghm• 17 years ago

I use a MacBook Pro with 2 GB, and I'm very happy with it. Would it be nice to have 4 GB? Yes. Would I work faster with 4 GB? No (I would work much faster if I just spent less time reading Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia, etc.)

critic• 17 years ago

> By quadrupling the performance of your employee's system

But you don't necessarily quadruple the performance by quadrupling memory.

More memory -> slower hybernation

64 bit -> fatter pointers, leading to larger memory consumption

likpok2• 17 years ago

64-bit -> more registers (8!) -> fewer memory accesses, so it might even out a bit.

neilc• 17 years ago

I'm very happy that I upgraded my MacBook Pro to 4GB of RAM -- as depressing as it may be, it was just painful trying to do work with only 2GB of RAM, and 4GB is barely enough. The biggest memory hog is VMWare, but Eclipse, Firefox, and OSX itself take up a lot of memory. In addition, you really need your entire working set of documents in memory, so that means the source code of all the projects you're working on. Considering the cost of 4GB of RAM for the MBP, upgrading is a no-brainer.

antipax• 17 years ago

I have 4GB on a regular old Macbook and I've never had any trouble whatsoever keeping not only Xcode and Firefox running in the background, but also a VM running XP, VS2008 and Google Chrome on it, among other programs. 8GB is useful if you need all of your (many many) programs ready to go at once or if you're dealing with HD video, though.

ionfish• 17 years ago

Running OS X, I just got an upgrade from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. I wouldn't have bothered--just running the OS, Eclipse etc. is fine--but when I'm running Photoshop and an instance of XP under VMWare Fusion, things start getting a little sluggish.

lgriffith• 17 years ago

Hardware is cheap. People are expensive. However these facts are lost on most upper management.

I have developed software for four decades. I was expected to develop the next generation software on what was essentially obsolete systems. I was never allowed to use development hardware that was much over current entry level capability. I did it but at what cost of lost opportunity and lost productivity? The management was stupid cubed if you ask me.

coryrc• 17 years ago

From the title I thought he meant hard drive space.

On my netbook 16GB is plenty and 8GB would be just enough. That's including all my dev tools. The 1G of RAM is more than enough.

Nine Reasons Why 8GB Is Only Just Enough

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