[shawnz]

I am on a fairly RAM constrained workstation (4GB) so I have no choice but to close it when I'm not using it. Otherwise I'll spend just as long swapping as I would opening a new instance.

[macinjosh]

I don't think a machine with just 4GB of RAM can be considered a 'workstation'.

[shawnz]

Ouch! It's not much, but it's mine.

[orf]

Are you running Windows? Could put *nix on it, reduce the amount of crap running in the background and pick a low-memory shell?

[shawnz]

The biggest consumer of RAM for me is chrome, not windows, and it is basically essential to my development process to have it open all the time. So I worry an OS change would not produce an appreciable enough performance improvement to justify changing my whole workflow over.

[arbie]

Is Chromium on Linux a suitable alternative for your development workflow?

[analogmemory]

Rude