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Ask HN: How much RAM do you have? Think you need more?

4 points by rahilsondhi ↗ HN
I have 8 GB RAM on my 2010 MacBook Pro. With Vagrant running, I frequently get under 300 MB of available RAM. Do I need 16 GB?

How much do you have and do you think you need more?

23 comments

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TheSwordsman
It depends on my system. Both my work MacBook Pro and personal MacBook Air have 8GB of RAM. There have been times where I've been 10GB in to swap, and the performance of the system makes me think I'm actively paging.

However, for most cases on my work/personal laptop the 8GB of RAM is plenty.

On my desktop PC, however, I have 12GB of RAM. I use this primarily for gaming, and I have definitely used 8+ GB on this box. The one time, admittedly, Windows Update was using about 9GB of RAM for no reason. But I have had games get up above 3GB in usage.

Also, are you sure your RAM is unavailable and not just used for disk cache or something?

abiko
Macs are based on BSD and such wouldn't use paging as Windows does, only swapping in case if you are reaching 100% of memory.
rahilsondhi
How do I check if my RAM is being used as disk cache? Is that known as "swap"? I'm using the FreeMemory app which tells me that 371 MB is free right now.

I have a 120 GB SSD with 8 GB free.

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fr0stycr4ck
I use 8gb on my mid 2010 MacBook Pro and find that it needs to be rebooted every so often to clear the memory. Since Lion OS X likes to hog all the RAM for some reason.
conductor
Using available RAM is good, not bad. Why do you have those 8 GBs of RAM if you want your system to starve (read: use more _slow_ HDD) and use the half of it? It's OK when OSes use all the RAM for caches and buffers, they are smart enough to invalidate them (or move to the SWAP) if some application needs more memory.
fr0stycr4ck
After a program terminates the RAM is returned to OS X but it will not allow other applications use any of it. It is a bug with their virtual memory. It will say there are gigabytes of inactive memory but continue to use a swap and not allocate it.
bayesianhorse
I can't speak for Macs, but I am very pleased with my 16Gb setup. I probably almost never use it all, but I do get above 8 Gb.
venomsnake
12 but shooting at 32 on the next build (top of the current mobo).

You can never have enough RAM as a developer. I just hate closing any kinds of applications and try to restart only on patch Tuesday ...

And with RAM so cheap there is no excuse not to max it to what your MB supports.

taylorbuley
Are you sure you need so much memory allocated to VMs? Worth mentioning is this blurb from Vagrant's old docs (http://docs-v1.vagrantup.com/v1/docs/base_boxes.html):

Make sure the default memory allocation is not too high. Most people don’t want to download a box to find it using 1 GB of RAM. We typically set it at 360 MB to start, since that is the size of most small slices.

agibsonccc
I tend to use most of my RAM and I have 16GB. I tend to do a lot of dataset/number crunching and have a few different services running at once.

I tend to see that as an extreme case though. For everyday web dev 8GB seems more than sufficient. I wouldn't say it's a requirement, but if you can opt for it you might as well. RAM is cheap.

aroch
I have 64GB in my hackintosh, I was originally planning on 32GB but for some reason Amazon sent me two sets of 32 so who am I to complain?
junto
I have 16GB in my Asus, but I'm running Windows and Visual Studio 2012 needs it all!
gee_totes
I have 3 GB of ram in my Thinkpad T60 and that seems to handle about everything I need to do. Why would I need more?
jamesjguthrie
I have 4 GB in my 2012 Mac Mini and it is definitely not enough!
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andrewryno
4 GB on my Macbook Air. It's more than enough usually, but today I was running my 512 MB Vagrant VM and many Python processes running (workers), which consumed about ~3 GB of memory alone and helped bring my laptop to a crawl. So having maybe 6 GB would be great.
tagabek
16GB on my late 2011 MacBook Pro. I rarely go below 8 GB, and I love the freedom of having more than enough. I would highly recommend it!
hhandoko
16GB - the maximum supported on my current hardware. Ideally I'd like 32GB.

I develop SharePoint solutions on a two-VM configuration locally (DC - 1GB, and app server - 8GB), both off a second drive (SSD). RAM utilisation are always ~90%.

Note: When the VMs are off, it hovers around 6GB usage. Each instances of Visual Studio 2012 I run adds an extra 500MB - 1GB to overall usage.

AsmMAn
Is there some non-Mac user here also to me?
eggestad
I put in 32GB last time and now I have enough, meaning the machine almost always have RAM to spare, but I do have a usage > 16GB generally.
dagw
I have 4 GB on my macbook air that I use for traveling, web surfing and hacking various side projects and never run into problems. I have 16 GB on my 'big' laptop that I use for serious work doing data transformation and analysis and I often wish I had 32 GB.
chilicuil
WTF you do with your RAM?, What you used to do when there were not machine with more that 4GB?, I've a machine with 4GB ram and I feel me in the heaven, most of the time I'm under 2GB usage.., using Ubuntu 12.04 here