8GB RAM is not for coding!

[zakarhino]

Most people paying attention said this before the M1 devices even launched but we were met with a bombardment of people claiming 8GB on M1 is all you need because "Apple is magic and stuff." I hope M1X has at least a 32GB option.

 

[jake_the_tester]

I personally prefer Arch for such things. For fun and playing around I find it more satisfying creating own operating systems as proof of concept. Maybe that's just me though.

Archlinux is for newbies who are eager to try some flavors of Linux world in advance. The starting point of building a whole Destro is based on compiling everything from source codes and organize them with specific packaging systems. Not just clone.

 

[techfreak23]

That’s exactly why I opted for a 2018 Intel Mac mini. My workload wouldn’t allow me to go with anything less than 16GB. I actually upgraded to 32GB and even with all of my work apps opened, I only hit about 20-24 GB. I tried to max it out and only hit 28 GB.

 

[zakarhino]

PSA: useless posts in this thread include:

1) Projecting your insecurity by telling people they're not "real developers."

2) Telling people you can get by on 4GB on RAM.

No. 1 is just cringe, I've never met a developer that complains about "fake developers" without carrying their entire rucksack of insecurity and egotism with them. Just stop, it's unrelated to the thread and I get secondhand embarrassment whenever I'm reminded that I share a community with these sorts of people.

As for no. 2: Congrats, good for you. You can somehow get by on 4GB on RAM. Meanwhile anyone running more than 3 apps at a time (and frequently flipping between them) needs more RAM than that. I've seen significantly more poweruser developers state they need more RAM than is currently offered on M1 than I've seen people say they get along without issue. If I'm in the middle of work I usually have 10 apps open (with additional subprocesses like Node running), many of which are electron (unfortunately). I can just about get by on 32GB and I don't want to use SWAP like M1 does to counter the low RAM because it will kill my SSD pretty quickly. Estimates at the moment put the M1 SSD life at about 2-3 years before failure. That's unacceptable.

 

[vigilant]

I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air w/ 8GB and a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro w/ 32GB. I run 2 screens off my MBP and one off my MBA, both of which are 100% of the time running at a minimum phpStorm, vsCode, Navicat Premium, Mongo Compass, Chrome and multiple shells and my M1 MacBook Air consistently outperforms my MacBook Pro! I can’t even believe how well it handles the load and how fast it is.

p.s. IMHO people that use Wordpress aren’t real developers and at least the few I’ve had the unfortunate experience of knowing tend to not understand how any of the technology they use actually works, since none of them actually went to school for computer science but all of them think they’re engineers😂

I am shocked that you are the first person to say this. Wordpress isn’t “development”.

Also… who runs Wordpress locally?!? Seriously, there is SOOOOOO many ways to do it without running a Wordpress blog on your own box. You can spin up a linode for close to nothing for this.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Archlinux is for newbies who are eager to try some flavors of Linux world in advance. The starting point of building a whole Destro is based on compiling everything from source codes and organize them with specific packaging systems. Not just clone.

And what exactly is it that you’re achieving by compiling existing sources instead of using a bare bone distro and configure it for your needs? Besides wasting a lot of time I mean. The whole process is very simple, described in countless Linux magazines. It used to be a normal thing everyone did 20-30 years ago, no magic here.

Or are you saying you have to do this because you have designed custom hardware and this is required? A simple kernel module would not suffice then? I kind of doubt we’re talking about a custom architecture.

 

[zakarhino]

Archlinux is for newbies who are eager to try some flavors of Linux world in advance. The starting point of building a whole Destro is based on compiling everything from source codes and organize them with specific packaging systems. Not just clone.

And what exactly is it that you’re achieving by compiling existing sources instead of using a bare bone distro and configure it for your needs? Besides wasting a lot of time I mean. The whole process is very simple, described in countless Linux magazines. It used to be a normal thing everyone did 20-30 years ago, no magic here.

Or are you saying you have to do this because you have designed custom hardware and this is required? A simple kernel module would not suffice then? I kind of doubt we’re talking about a custom architecture.

You two are very smart and know a lot about software! Wow! Very impressive!

There, we can stop the knowledge contest and get back to discussing potential RAM issues on M1.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

I am shocked that you are the first person to say this. Wordpress isn’t “development”.

Well, “back in the day” development used to be done by computer scientists. Along came web development and scripting with script-kiddies who did not understand what they’re doing. Hence many people see web-development not as real software development. At some point media designers started to build websites and they’re usually doing a better job than computer scientists because they know what good design looks like. You can easily do it without a profound understanding of software engineering and what’s going on under the hood. See the OP who does not understand how unified memory works, what the drawback and benefits are, all while making statements about it that have been proven wrong countless times not just in peer reviewed publications and conferences.

So yes, web-development and Wordpress is a different kind of development when the baseline is computer science. It is a form of development non the less.

 

[apparatchik]

In regards to Wordpress, and any other CMS for that matter, there's a distinction between "site-building" (create and configure content, customize the front-end through the back office, setup user roles, build web forms, a touch of custom css/javascript here and there, etc.), all of which are not considered development.

In the context of Wordpress or CMS's, development would fall in the likes of coding a custom plugin, developing a theme, setting up a REST API, or in general extending the out-of-box functionality through custom back-end code. What most of the media designers are doing is site building, not actual development.

The type of web projects that rely on Wordpress are of course usually of the simpler kind, usually poorly paid, comparably. No large institution would manage and base the set of its many web properties on Wordpress instances. Heck, you wouldn't even want to use it as a web store front if you also have, say, a mobile app front as well.

 

[JMacHack]

Because I love this coversation:

 

[Joelist]

I've been coding on a base model M1 MBA for months now and have not experienced any real memory issues. Of course the first thing I did (easy decision) was NOT to use Chrome (which is spyware among other things). Sublime Text and VS Code work beautifully as well. So does DB Visualizer.

 

[ManicMarc]

I don't see light coding there, I see Chrome consuming 12.5 gigabytes of memory.

Actually I'm doing some coding right now, I'm on a 16 GB machine and I still have < 8 GB RAM usage, and that's with macOS knowing it's on a 16 GB machine.

The lesson is - if you need to Google something every two minutes, then it's not great for coding. Experienced developers can get by with 8GB ;-)

 

[awsom82]

Archlinux is for newbies who are eager to try some flavors of Linux world in advance.

ROFL

 

[ImaginaryNerve]

I've managed a handful of projects so far on 8GB and the only issue I've come across yet was a slight, barely more than a second or two at most, slowdown when loading a simulation in Xcode for the first or second time. After that, then no issues even if I change the "hardware" I'm simulating.

I've honestly run into more issues with Safari and certain websites with RAM than any applications. Oh! And there's this...odd lag spike whenever I copy from a native app and past it into a Rosetta/Non-Native app. Actually, other than Safari, I'd say my only issues have been with Rosetta apps.

Edit: Fixed a word because I have fat fingers and I suck.

 

[leman]

I have to admit that I have some difficulty following the base premise of this thread. First of all, I don't think it's surprising that some users will run into limitations of 8GB with more demanding workloads, that makes perfect sense. But I'm not quite sure what OP is trying to say. The only unusual thing their post is showing is Chrome using 12GB of memory, with 10GB of that being page out (probably due to inactivity of background tabs or something). System RAM usage actually seems fairly low and emory pressure is acceptable. I don't really see what any of this has to do with "coding" per se.

If OP is a web developer, well, it doesn't surprise me. Modern webdev frameworks are extraordinary wasteful and resource efficiency seems to be the last thing they care about. I definitely would not recommend 8GB for such work, no matter whether you are using an M1 Mac, an Intel Mac or some other computer.

8GB of RAM on M1 mac is shared by the CPU and the GPU, we are fooled by Apple. That dedicated RAM to dedicated devices is important. I don't feel much lag on my i9 9900K 16GB workstation.

You don't feel much lag on your "workstation" because it obviously has more RAM which is more suitable to your workload. What this is supposed to have with the GPU and its dedicated RAM is beyond me.

 

[Oldjackson]

If I had to buy one, I'd put 16GB in it for sure (or better still, wait for the incoming M2 or whatever it will be called).
Then again, I would also avoid having 200 Chrome tabs open even on a Mac Pro 😅

 

[mazz0]

Vim, Webstorm, VS Code, Sublime

Why do you need so many different tools for what is effectively just text editing? What do you do in vim you couldn't do in Sublime or VS Code?

 

[mazz0]

But really, it's $600!!!!!

What's $600?

 

[thenewperson]

What's $600?

I'm guessing they were referring to the Mac mini.

Anyway discussion of RAM on ASi machines is so worthless at this point. There's a whole lot of talking past each other, making nonsensical claims about the equality of different RAM sizes on different architectures, and people not paying attention to memory pressure on their own systems for it to be productive most of the time.

 

[alien3dx]

View attachment 1774048
View attachment 1774049

For anyone who wanna do developping or designing on M1 Mac, don't buy the 8G version.
I got 2T+ writes in 1 day. Even if you wanna so some light coding, M1 is not for you. When the system is caching using SSD, you will have so much lagging.

that's the reason , i still using my imac 2017 to write code. I only used macbook m1 to test swift ui and meet customer. Android development /Web Development more on imac 2017

 

[alien3dx]

Maybe he is the type of “programmer” who always complains to his boss that he has no time, untenable deadlines, can’t clearly express himself and always ships buggy apps, even though we all know that nowadays nobody knows how to really code and everyone is using all these tools that spoon-feed developers or simply just do copy-paste from StackOverflow. Typical dev that will blame “marketing” or the horrible “sales people” that are mean and don’t understand “technology“.

Old times, all depend on SDK . These day, people don't do it and pretty freakin lazy to document example. All playing test and play including apple itself. PHP is the best documentation as it which make it quite popular quick for years from perl era.

Sales person also to blaim on this, these day recruiter 3 years in flutter while flutter may not existed. 5 years in react native but salary .

Each time some new "framework" or "library" in the market , then suddely people jump to wagon without knowing it the same "re-invent the wheel".

Old folks mostly have their own library /framework to deal with nonsense bandwagon.

 

[jdb8167]

That is truly shocking, isn't it? Two tools reporting the same results when using exactly the same underlying mechanism... who would have thought. 🙄

Not quite. The more sophisticated smartmontools is using a more generic API with their own interpretation of the data offsets. My version is using the very specific NVMe SMART API and Apple’s data structures. It is also radically simplified so that anyone with a basic understanding of C code can see that it is only using Apple APIs.

It is very likely that the API I used is just a wrapper on the same APIs used by smartmontools. So you are technically correct that they are using the same underlying mechanism.

I only wrote it because there was so much skepticism that the tools were somehow mistaken. I originally just audited the smartmontools code but decided that it was too complicated to be absolutely sure that there were no bugs. Now with my simple version, I am convinced that the data is being reported correctly (limited to Apple designing their hardware and software correctly.)

 

[Rock Star]

Just for you :

kernel_task is not an actual process like the others you see in Activity Monitor, it is a kind of “virtual process” that actually represents the kernel itself.


This means that it is not kernel_task itself that performs some job and in the process writes to disk, rather the kernel is continually (many, many times per second often) asked by your running programs to do stuff on their behalf.

— Source : https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/420053

So find the programs with excessive disk writes first : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/8gb-ram-is-not-for-coding.2295987/post-29882568

 

[cawsllyffant]

I'm on an M1 8GB. I've had a few minor issues doing python developement -- for example, if I forget to quit IntelliJ before starting minecraft, my mouse is funky. (I have a swiftpoint pro and the help app dies consistently in that circumstance.) Also, if I bring up a VM (ARM Windows or ARM Linux), I have to close down a bunch of apps.

That's about it, really. But I have a separate docker box (well, 2 really) running my server processes. I think it all comes down to how you feel comfortable working. If you prefer to have all your procs/containers on one machine, then yeah, I think your going to feel the pressure.

When the Pros come out, I'm for sure upgrading but for the price and my workflow, it's a nice little dev box.

 

[neuralengine]

Why do you need so many different tools for what is effectively just text editing?

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, especially when working across several languages. Webstorm is more of an IDE, Sublime is closer to a basic text editor. VS Code is somewhere in the middle, with a very rich plugin ecosystem.

But yes, ultimately it’s too many tools for what is basically just editing text, which is why I’ve been transitioning to Vim, hoping to eventually use it exclusively. Almost there.

What do you do in vim you couldn't do in Sublime or VS Code?

Vim does navigation and text editing in a completely different way to GUI-based editors which I find a lot faster and more efficient.