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by josho 2541 days ago
Not sure of the Air specs, but I generally recommend paying for 16gb of memory. I found google docs and other web apps quickly consumed my 8gb memory. But, if you don't mind closing tabs and being mindful of running programs you can get by with 8.

If you ever find yourself CPU bound then you can spin up a VM image and run those jobs remotely.

While running low on storage isn't a problem either as several cloud options exist for that.
1 comments
pfranz 2541 days ago
> I found google docs and other web apps quickly consumed my 8gb memory. But, if you don't mind closing tabs and being mindful of running programs you can get by with 8.

I gather you're using Chrome? Safari seems to "do this for you" in a sometimes frustrating way. Similar to the iPhone, Safari on the desktop seems to aggressively unload webpages when they're not focused. This means large Google Docs get reloaded every time you switch windows. I haven't used Firefox heavily for this kind of work, but it seems to behave better than both.

Chrome with to wrong tabs open can absolutely murder your battery life, too.

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josho 2541 days ago
I am a safari user and don’t keep _that_ many tabs. I experienced tab reloading, which I didn’t mind. But even after a week of use I found I benefitted from rebooting to clear out memory.
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pfranz 2540 days ago
I'm a little surprised so much of your 8gb went away using Safari if you don't keep too much open. Safari is generally great, but I've had to deal with abysmally large Google Sheets and had it reload every time I switched away even though it was the only window/tab open--Firefox wasn't too much better, it would constantly recalculate formulas. I feel like I got that behavior in Safari one or two other times with heavy SPA, but normally it uses much less battery and seems to use much less RAM than Firefox or Chrome.

I also haven't seen much of a need at all for regular rebooting. Looking back it seems like I'll reboot my laptop every 2-3 weeks, usually for an app that has a kernel driver, to boot into Windows, or to troubleshoot an egregious problem like my sound or bluetooth breaking. I've never done it for RAM, but I have closed browsers to save battery/RAM.

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