I run Windows 10 on a laptop with 16GB RAM and on fresh boot it uses ~2.5GB, which leaves a lot of memory for other stuff, but I guess when even the new Notepad uses 20x more RAM that the old one it makes sense to require 32GB RAM.. One can hope that due to the high price of RAM more effort will be put into reducing memory usage in general, because right now it's ridiculous
Meanwhile the MacBook Neo is amazing with just 8 GB of RAM. I just got it for using as a "thin client" for AI but it can handle at least Godot gamedev without hiccups
Had a laptop purchased in December 2024 with 16 GB of RAM. Running a single VS Code instance and Edge with maybe 10 tabs consumed almost 100% of the RAM. Doing any actual development work required me to upgrade to 64 gigs of RAM. Thankfully it required DDR4 SODIMMs and I had two lying around from a recently deceased Mini PC.
I am in this bucket too. MSSQL + VS + tested Server + tested Client on 16GB + Win11 will just choke MSSQL server into constant timeouts. But if I will offload MSSQL onto another computer everything works just fine.
I've always found that it's pretty amazing how much effective speed can be gained by thinking about your memory usage and doing things that "don't make sense", such as leaving requests compressed in memory. Even re-compressing them after decryption is "obviously" less efficient than not doing so ... except it' can be faster, even on servers with 192GB ram.
Half the articles on Go vs Java also make this point. "We're so much easier on memory usage than Java's Object and that alone gives us a XX% speed boost".
It also can become an extra layer of protection against thrashing when overloaded.
If you are planning to use vibe coded programs then you better plan for a lot of RAM. Well I say planning when its really being thrust upon you in a lot of cases.
But be extremely mindful when looking at anything touched by Anthropic or OpenAI.
These coding agents have terrible feedback cycles for lag and memory leaks. A particularly egregious one is GPU usage which is absurdly high in most of these apps due to terrible design and react render loop issues. Someone needs to make RL enviroments than punish this.
I will caveat this with saying being wasteful with resources is not new at all. But at this point it seems like no one is doing any amount of basic due diligence.
My Windows 11 laptop with 32 GB RAM only allows for about 10-12gb user addressable before starting to crash. I do keep a lot of Chrome tabs open so that can easily get to 6-8gb, plus IntelliJ can use another 4-5. Add on VScode, sometimes Firefox or Opera, an email client, some other utilities (or god forbid try opening WSL), and I'm constantly getting crashes. And as I stated, only about 12gb of applications on a 32gb machine. It makes no sense.
After purchasing a brand new pre-built from Microcenter (mostly for the GPU & RAM inside), I didn't even boot the Microsoft garbage – started straight into Ubuntu 26 USB installer, formatted, and was up and running immediately. Now this new 5070Ti purrs more-happily...
Sillily, the RGB-bullshit 32GB RAM sticks were cheaper than identical unlits... but I do wish I'd paid more for the latter now, because I'm going to [eventually] have to get inside of these stupid gimmicky LED-covers and tear them all directly off the PCB – so fucking stupid [RGB hardwired onto RAM is, without a physical switchoff].
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tl;dr: I don't care what Microslop does or does not recommend, because I would never in my lifetime be caught using anything post-Win7Pro (if it had to be MSFT).
> It has reduced memory overhead across apps and components and has optimized WinUI 3 to make built-in apps use less memory.
Anyone with developer experience with the WinUI 3 mess, knows that until now this is only marketing that Windows outlets keep repeating out from Microsoft corporate marketing.
They'd have to gave up on huge amount of own bloat to make system work fine again under 8GB. I'm not sure how that can be achieved with Microsoft attitude towards desktop users - they're just a... data cattle for them.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 50.3 ms ] threadI'm going back to the days when 640k was all we could ever use.
Linux users don't rejoice too much, the Fedoras and Ubuntus were eating so much of my RAM I had to take refuge in Alpine.
Half the articles on Go vs Java also make this point. "We're so much easier on memory usage than Java's Object and that alone gives us a XX% speed boost".
It also can become an extra layer of protection against thrashing when overloaded.
I wish people put more attention into this.
But be extremely mindful when looking at anything touched by Anthropic or OpenAI.
These coding agents have terrible feedback cycles for lag and memory leaks. A particularly egregious one is GPU usage which is absurdly high in most of these apps due to terrible design and react render loop issues. Someone needs to make RL enviroments than punish this.
I will caveat this with saying being wasteful with resources is not new at all. But at this point it seems like no one is doing any amount of basic due diligence.
Sensationalist article which doesn’t belong on HN.
Sillily, the RGB-bullshit 32GB RAM sticks were cheaper than identical unlits... but I do wish I'd paid more for the latter now, because I'm going to [eventually] have to get inside of these stupid gimmicky LED-covers and tear them all directly off the PCB – so fucking stupid [RGB hardwired onto RAM is, without a physical switchoff].
----
tl;dr: I don't care what Microslop does or does not recommend, because I would never in my lifetime be caught using anything post-Win7Pro (if it had to be MSFT).
I even develop windows apps. On Linux, built on GitHub actions.
If I had windows forced on me for corp reasons, like I did once, just full screen a VM
Anyone with developer experience with the WinUI 3 mess, knows that until now this is only marketing that Windows outlets keep repeating out from Microsoft corporate marketing.